Ian Fan
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can bring various benefits, such as extra passive incomes for houseowners, increasing property values, and decreasing the housing price for social equity. So far, many ADU friendly policies have been enacted in California. Our research aims at supporting the arction of ADU popularization with the latest technologies.
Nowadays, residential solar is becoming a financial decision for homeowners, not just an environmental one, because many policies are supporting solar energy utilization and the cost of installation keeps dropping. And ADUs offer another oppotunity to expand solar panel installation for homeowners, while this solar panel expansion contributes to the renewable energy goal of carbon-free electricity in California by 2045. So, how much would the solar panel installation on ADUs save approximately?
Our team was using customized AI model and Solar Energy Calculation Tool to conduct our research. The results were impressive and encouraging.
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) can bring various benefits, such as extra passive incomes for houseowners, increasing property values, and decreasing the housing price for social equity. So far, many ADU friendly policies have been enacted in California. Our research aims at supporting the arction of ADU popularization with the latest technologies.
Our group explored a method to research how solar panel installation can impact ADUs development with AI training strategies. Our goal is to add additional ADUs using neural networks in satellite maps and statistically estimate maximal solar energy production in a target area. We visualized solar roof conditions for the speculation in a new satellite view in parcels, blocks or communities. With a collective image dataset that we built for Pix2pix neural networks training, we finalized our research with a setup city platform to evaluate how new collective solar energy production would affect neighborhoods on various scales.
We mapped out the solar efficiency with satellite image processing in neural networks based on the color brightness and calculated image color ratios for valid solar roof area estimation. Besides that, our group collected relative electricity rates and solar installation costs to estimate AUD solar roof financial reward.
We simulated the solar radiation map with ADUs installed in a neat area in Beverly Hill and converted the image results into a simplified color ratio version.
The final results was calculated from the color ratio analysis and mathematical model we created based on the research.
ADU offers a great opportunity to create passive income as a rental or utilize free spaces for personal use. While solar energy equipments are getting cheaper and more efficient. If homeowners are looking for a way to save both money and environment at the same time, there is no doubt that applying a solar panel system to support ADU instruction is practical and efficient.