Absolar’s Collaboration with Ordnance Survey

The collaboration between Absolar and Ordnance Survey is highlighted in a recent article published by Ordnance Survey.

OS is Britain’s mapping agency. As well as making the most up-to-date and accurate maps of the country, it is also a digital business. Together with its Partners it provides content helping governments, companies and individuals to be more effective both here and around the world.

Powered by Ordnance Survey (OS) data, Absolar’s remote solar survey technology considers intricate building details such as roof structure, orientation, shaded areas, sun path, and how the shading impacts change throughout the day. This data is combined into a data model to produce an estimation of how much energy each solar panel will produce every half hour. The assessment provides valuable financial evaluations such as carbon savings, electricity savings and ROI to be forecasted with extremely high accuracy.

To achieve even more detailed assessments, Absolar needed a clearer understanding of factors such as property layout within a building, whole sides there, what’s inside it and whether it is residential or commercial. That’s where Ordnance Survey came in. Combining Absolar’s technology with OS' data allowed for an even more granular level of detail to be unlocked. The OS API is also used by Absolar to determine whether a building is commercial or residential, as well as providing the floorplan to better understand the building’s interior layout.

Furthermore, discrepancies in addressing data between different organisations can cause challenges that require additional time and effort to data cleanse. With the use of AddressBase and Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN), Absolar can look up 5,000 addresses with confidence that all organisations and agencies involved in a project are concerned with the correct building.

This collaboration has significantly improved Absolar’s surveying process, reducing time require for a survey from seven hours to three minutes. This means that more surveys can be conducted, uncovering more solar potential, and further improving Absolar’s ability to carry out their vision of having solar panels on every suitable roof in England.

Thus, in the past 12 months Absolar has installed 1,213kW_p of Solar PV systems which will offset 206,348kg of CO₂ in the first year of operation alone. This would not have been possible without the use of OS data allowing Absolar to assess more properties, and thus inform more property occupants and owners of the associated costs, benefits, and returns of solar power with complete transparency.

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