In an effort to aid the energy transition and meet the Paris agreement goals, the municipality of Amsterdam is willing to take a step forward by deploying photovoltaic (PV) technology on buildings. However, the municipality and house owners are not fully aware of the real PV potentials on their roof-tops and of the challenges they will be facing when exchanging energy with the Low Voltage (LV) grid. So, in the project Maarten is currently working on - an accurate PV potential map is created, indicating the maximum possible PV energy yield per building, considering all surfaces receiving sufficiently high irradiation. Furthermore, a grid impact model will test how much generated power the grid can actually take in from each building cluster, before problems will arise for the relevant grid components. Additional conflicting aspects for PV adoption are concurrent roof purposes, like roof terraces are considered, as well as natural installation moments, for example a planned roof reconstruction. The main outcome from this will be a PV installation calendar, indicating the ideal time for building clusters to start implementation of PV systems in certain districts of the city. A 3D visualization will show how the city appearance will change over the years with increasing PV penetration levels.
Bio
Maarten was born near Breda in 1993. He finished his BSc degree for Mechanical Engineering in 2017 and MSc degree for Sustainable Energy Technologies in 2019, both at the TU Delft. In October 2019 he started working as a researcher for the Photovoltaic Devices and Materials and in November 2019 he joined the AMS Institute as a part-time research fellow.
“We plan a lot towards 2050 and expect that solar PV will dominate the energy transition. Now let's do it!”
Maarten Verkou
Former Research Fellow at AMS Institute
