Observatório Fotovoltaico maps solar power projects across Portugal and includes information on installation size, year of commissioning, type of research and developer. The free tool already contains about 1,000 projects, which corresponds to 60% of the country’s total capacity.
Project manager Rodrigo Silva said pv magazine that he admitted that until now the public has had two types of data: official statistics from the Directorate-General for Energy and Geology (DGEG) or the National Association for Renewable Energy (APREN), which provide limited information on installed capacity or scattered data. from companies that advertise their work through various online platforms such as websites and LinkedIn pages.
Silva launched the “PV Map” app in March 2023. He already manually mapped more than 1,000 PV projects across the country, which represents about 60 percent of Portugal’s total capacity, and is now looking for companies to volunteer information on projects that have not yet been mapped.
The map can currently be filtered by region, project developer and exploration type, including self-consumption, energy communities, large-scale, feed-in tariffs, mini generation, micro generation, PPA and off-grid. When you select a specific project, it also displays information about its installation size, year of deployment, and media links.
Many of the identified projects still lack data, but Silva hopes the process will speed up as more companies volunteer to report. A partnership with DGEG or APREN would be a welcome development project for a project that aims to facilitate access to quality information on solar energy in Portugal.
The platform released a new feature this week, and more announcements are in the works.
“I noticed that as the number of projects grew, it was harder to get an overview of their applications,” said Silva. “So I found a way to classify the entity benefiting from solar production according to industry. This gives companies an idea of the sectors where they have the most or the fewest customers, as well as political parties an idea of how the adoption of this technology is developing in different sectors.
The preliminary results, currently published as an infographic on LinkedIn and as exclusive reports for partners, show that the food industry benefits the most from solar energy production, followed by the mineral industry, education and the textile industry.
