Urban acceptability of solar installations: LESO-QSV GRID, a software tool to support municipalities

The "LESO-QSV Acceptability" tool is a decision-supporting aid for municipalities in charge of approving new active solar installations. It does not bar any urban zone from being targeted, but requires architectural integration quality, as a function of the “criticity” of the intervention area, i.e. the architectural sensitivity of the local urban zone, combined with the visibility of the proposed solar plant on the building. This tool includes several elements: the software "LESO-QSV GRID", a detailed description of the approach, documentation on active solar integration in architecture, and finally, an application form for new installations. The LESO-QSV GRID program fulfils three complementary functions:  Support municipalities to set their specific levels of required quality for the different “situations” (zones and visibility) of their territory – in practice selecting a grid (GRID).  Educate architects, installers and building owners through a very large palette of evaluated solar integration examples (positive and negative), that can be filtered according to different criteria (context specificities, solar technology, system size, integration approach …) ,.  Help municipalities to explain in an interactive and visually convincing way how the method works and justify potential rejections to users The main purpo se of the software tool is to simulate the effect of different severity policies (from lenient to strict) on the existing examples (more than 90 cases). These simulations allow to check in real-time which installations would be approved or rejected and to choose the most suitable severity degree for the municipality. A difficulty in the application of this approach lays in the “objective” evaluation of the architectural integration quality of a solar plant. LESO-QSV constitutes a simplified method based on objective criteria, which have been synthetized in three questions. All examples in the software database include the answers given by experts to these three questions, allowing the user, in association with the documentation accompanying the method, to understand how to use these criteria. Additionally, the examples of the database itself provide an important inspiration source to help realize successful architectural integrations in different configurations.