LAUSR

Solar energy planning becomes crucial to develop adaptive policies ensuring both energy efficiency and climate change mitigation. Cities, particularly building’s rooftops, constitute a promising infrastructure for enabling the use of locale solar resources. This study proposes a combined engineering–statistical methodology to assess the photovoltaic potential of residential rooftops. Using validated algorithms for solar simulation and geographical information system (GIS) for spatial dissemination, the proposed methodology deals with the lack of data and allows an accurate investigation of the geographical and technical potential. Applied to the municipality of Laghouat, the results reveal that suitable rooftops areas for PV installations in the examined typologies were approximately between 18 and 35%. Moreover, the deployment of distributed PV systems on residential rooftops provides significant technical potential, which could cover up to 55% of the annual electricity needs. These original findings offer a realistic assessment of the usable solar potential within municipalities, which helps decision-makers establish energy efficiency strategies by reducing energy consumption and increasing the share of renewable electricity production. Additionally, the discussion offers valuable insight into energy management and investigates eventual energy sharing among residential buildings to achieve a net-zero energy balance at the municipal level.