WorkInternal toolsRoute simulation
Route based solar production simulation
Solar production on a moving vehicle changes with location, time and the route itself, so a static location estimate cannot describe every use case.
I built a route simulation tool that estimates how much energy a solar system could produce while a vehicle travels between two real locations.
The challenge
A long distance vehicle can move through very different solar conditions during the same trip. The estimate also depends on when the vehicle reaches each part of the route and how long the journey takes.
The challenge was to combine routing, time and geographically varying solar data into a result that the engineering team could use without manually reconstructing the journey.
What I built
The tool takes a start location, destination and solar system capacity, then builds and simulates the trip.
- Real route data
- Mapbox provides the road geometry and speed information used to reconstruct the trip between the selected locations.
- Time based route simulation
- A Python service progresses through the route over time, interpolating positions and accounting for driving periods so each part of the journey can be evaluated at the appropriate time.
- Solar production along the route
- The simulation samples photovoltaic production at geographic points along the journey using PVWatts data, then combines those values into an energy estimate for the trip.
- Seasonal comparison
- The tool repeats the calculation across dates in each season and returns average energy production so the team can compare how the same route performs through the year.
The output
The tool displays the calculated route on a map together with seasonal average energy production for the selected solar system.
This turns a start point and destination into a technical estimate based on the actual journey rather than a single fixed location.
My role
I built the web workflow and the Python simulation service behind it.
My work covered address and route handling, Mapbox integration, route interpolation, time based simulation, solar data integration, result processing and the interface used to visualize the route and seasonal output.
Stack
- Interface
- Next.jsTypeScriptMapbox
- Simulation
- PythonNumPy
- Solar data
- NREL PVWatts
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