If you’re considering solar power but aren’t quite sure it’s worth the expense, Google wants to point you in the right direction.
Global (23 August 2015) – Tapping into their many satellite imagery and the latest in artificial intelligence, the company is offering a new online service that will instantly estimate how much you’ll save with a roof full of solar panels. Google has put itself on the map by funding more than $2 billion in renewable energy projects.
Now the search giant wants to map the amount of sunlight your rooftop receives & help you decide if it makes financial sense to go solar.
Dubbed Project Sunroof, the recently released online tool enables you to type in your address & find out how much space you have for solar panels on your roof, how many hours of rooftop sunlight you’ll get a year, & how much money you’d save.
After typing in your address, a Google Earth image of your home & the surrounding neighborhood appears, with the roofs appearing in colours ranging from purple to yellow to indicate how much sunlight is striking the surface. The photos, however, appear in some cases to be at least one or two years old.
“As Google, we knew we had the expertise to do this well using Google maps & aerial imaging,” said Barry Fischer, a Google spokesperson. “Project Sunroof draws upon the same high-resolution imagery that powers Google Earth.”
Project Sunroof will also recommend the size of solar system that you should install based on your average electricity bill & it calculates how much you’ll save depending on whether you opt to finance the solar array with a loan, by leasing, or by purchase. Then it presents the option to request a consultation with Google’s solar provider partners — SunWork, Vivint, SunEdison, SunPower, or NRG Solar.
But Google’s tool — which is still a pilot and so far only available for residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, & Fresno, California — appears to be unique as it uses machine learning to distinguish a rooftop from, say, adjacent trees or lawns.
Fischer said in the future Google will collect a referral fee from those companies when a potential customer contacts it through Project Sunroof.
Google plans to expand the tool to other areas of the United States & eventually the world.
“During the coming months we’ll be exploring how to make the tool better and more widely available,” Fischer said.
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