🏝️ Area Limitations

[BenWinchester]

Issue

Within CLOVER, there is currently no consideration of the area available for an installation. For continental rural energy-access contexts, this is not really a problem: any energy system can simply take up as much land as is needed in order to meet demand whilst optimising the user's chosen optimisation criteria. For other scenarios however, such as island-based or urban contexts, space limitations become a key factor.

The inability of CLOVER to consider the space taken up, requiring users to perform ad-hoc calculations, is a limitation. Some of the time, CLOVER may select optimum systems that fall within space restrictions. However, when a system is selected that falls outside of these restrictions, the user is left with the difficult task of trying to probe other systems with similar parameters by hand.

Further, there are some scenarios, such as island-based installations, where space is at a premium, and the user may with to, not only set a threshold for the space available for the energy system, but optimise for the system which takes up the least area.

Proposal

CLOVER should be able to consider the area taken up the energy system:

• As a threshold criterion, such that systems larger than a certain area are rejected;
• As an optimisation criterion, so that CLOVER can select systems based on those that occupy the least area.

There are no obvious alternatives to considering area. Potential alternatives include

• A simple "number of components" calculation, which, while inaccurate, would be much easier to implement.

[BenWinchester]

General thoughts

When optimising for agri-PV installations, this is something that will likely need to be considered.