Turning Hong Kong’s sunshine into electricity

How to better harness solar energy in Hong Kong? Dr Charles Wong Man-sing from the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics and Dr Vivien Lu Lin from the Department of Building Services Engineering have investigated into the installation capacity, energy generation capacity and environmental benefits of investing in PV energy in Hong Kong.

They find that Hong Kong enjoys sunshine for more than half of its days in a year and is, therefore, highly suitable for solar power generation. Using high-resolution airborne laser scanning data and geographical information systems data to map the available rooftop area in Hong Kong, researchers also comment that out of the 309,000 buildings, 233,000 are suitable for installing PV panels with a total area of 39 km². The potential annual solar energy output can reach 4,674 GWh, or 10.7% of Hong Kong's energy consumption. This will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 3 million tonnes.

More about this story can be read from their media interview here.