In the world of environmental design, we often talk about solar radiation in terms of avoidance . We use shading devices to reject heat, glazing coatings to manage transmittance, and massing studies to reduce cooling loads.
Let’s dismantle the black box. How does Ladybug PV actually work, what assumptions is it making, and how do we move from kWh/m² to actual return on investment? First, a critical clarification for the purists: Ladybug PV does not perform its own cell-level semiconductor simulation. That would be computationally ruinous for an urban-scale model. Instead, Ladybug leverages the NREL PVWatts v8 API (or the local DC power model if you disable API calls). ladybug pv
Before you run the simulation, walk your site. Check the albedo. Note the soiling (is it a dusty quarry or a clean hospital roof?). Then, let Ladybug PV do what it does best: translate the sun's physics into dollars. Have you found a discrepancy between Ladybug PV and your actual utility meter data? I’d love to hear about calibration workflows in the comments. In the world of environmental design, we often