Solar panel installation in Villajoyosa

Villajoyosa has three quite different kinds of building, and each one imposes a different limit on a solar installation.

Here the constraint is almost never irradiation — it is what the roof is, and what it can take.

What each kind of building here can actually carry

The painted houses of the old town are the hardest case. They are narrow, they share party walls, their roofs are small and often irregular, and many are old structures whose capacity for an additional distributed load cannot be assumed. The usable area on one of these is frequently only a few panels once you subtract chimneys, irregular geometry and shading from taller neighbours across a narrow street. That does not make a project impossible, but it makes it modest, and honest sizing matters more than anywhere else in the town.

The seafront blocks are the apartment case: one communal roof, several dozen flats, and the same shared-installation questions that apply anywhere with a communal roof. The useful project there is usually communal consumption rather than an individual flat.

The hillside villas are where the real opportunity is. Large roofs, no adjacent buildings to shade them, freedom of orientation, and households with pools and pumps that consume during daylight. These properties can host meaningful arrays, and their consumption patterns suit generation better than either of the other two categories.

The one hillside caveat is structure and exposure. Terraces and flat roofs on sloping sites can be more exposed to wind than their height suggests, and wind uplift on a tilted array is a real design input rather than a formality. Ballasting that would be adequate on a sheltered city roof is not automatically adequate here, and that calculation is part of the design.