Visualise Solar Potential and Building Risk with Ordnance Survey NGD Buildings
Overview
Parish Online includes Ordnance Survey's National Geographic Database (NGD) Buildings data. We load it into your account automatically and apply updates every month.
To make the data more insightful, we've created different visualisations for various themes. These are:
- Recent Changes - only shows buildings that have had updates in the last 3 months
- Solar Potential - the solar potential for residential and commercial buildings
- Number of Floors - visualising the number of floors and highlighting buildings that have higher risk.
Video Summary
How to view the data
To find the data, scroll down your Layer Control to find the "Ordnance Survey NGD" collection and click on it to expand it.
About the Data
Buildings
This is the default data provided by Ordnance Survey. It's got a single style and when clicked on, provides all the attribution available.
Most common use for this data is to select a building and copy it to one of your own editable layers.
Recent Changes
This displays only the buildings that have had changes made to them in the last 3 months. These may be attribution changes (i.e. Ordnance Survey has updated the text stored within them), or geometry changes (i.e. the shape of it has changed).
Number of Floors
This layer uses colour gradients to visualise the height differences of buildings.
- Blue gradient = any building graded by number of floors
- Yellow gradient = residential buildings over 11 metres which should have sprinklers
- Red gradient = any building over 18 metres or 11 storeys, classed as a Higher Risk Building (HRB) as per Building Safety Act 2022, and needs to be registered with Building Safety Regulator (BSR).
Solar Potential
This also uses a colour gradient where:
- Yellow to red gradient = representing residential buildings and the amount of solar capacity the roof could take.
- Light blue to dark blue gradient = representing commercial (and other) buildings and the amount of solar capacity the roof could take.
- Green = buildings that already have solar on them. This doesn't necessarily mean they've maximised the potential.
These calculations are not meant to be completely precise, rather highlight the big-hitters where buildings with a high potential can be targeted and fitted with solar. With discussions on the pros and cons of rooftop solar versus solar arrays over green spaces, this really brings the conversation to life.
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