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Google

Google Project Sunroof Now Provides Rooftop Solar Potential Data For All 50 US States

by Joshua S Hill March 16, 2017

Originally published on CleanTechnica.

Google’s has announced that its revolutionary Project Sunroof tool is now able to provide a reliable estimate of how much sunlight a given rooftop might receive in all 50 US states, up from 42 states nearly a year ago.

The last we heard from Project Sunroof, it was revealed that it had been expanded to provide data to 42 states across the US, up from 10 states only a few months earlier. Project Sunroof started as one of Google’s 20% projects — projects Google employees can work on in 20% of their time at Google, which sometimes then get branded as a Google product with the company’s full backing. Project Sunroof uses imagery from Google Maps and Google EARTH, 3D modelling, and machine learning to estimate how much sunlight a given rooftop receives, helping to answer how much energy a given rooftop could produce if it had solar panels.

Visualization of solar potential at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.

Google announced on its The Keyword blog this week that Project Sunroof is now providing data for all 50 US states, and according to Joel Conkling, product manager, the expanded data has shed some light (get it?) on some interesting insights about the potential US solar industry:

79% of all rooftops analyzed are technically viable for solar, meaning those rooftops have enough unshaded area for solar panels.
Over 90% of homes in Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico are technically viable, while states like Pennsylvania, Maine and Minnesota reach just above 60% viability.
Houston, TX, has the most solar potential of any US city in the Project Sunroof data, with an estimated 18,940 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of rooftop solar generation potential per year. Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Antonio, and New York follow Houston for the top 5 solar potential cities — see the full top 10 list in the chart below.

“If the top ten cities above reached their full rooftop solar potential, they’d produce enough energy to power 8 million homes across the US,” Conkling said.

Sample of Project Sunroof solar energy potential map

Reprinted with permission.

March 16, 2017 0 comment

Other Renewable Energy

Google Will Go 100% Renewable By Next Year

by Steve Hanley December 6, 2016

written by Steve Hanley

Donald Trump may want America to burn coal like it’s 1947 again, but real adults are taking a more pragmatic approach to not destroying the entire ecosystem for the sake of a few shekels. Today, Google announced that it will be powered 100% by renewables by the end of 2017. Why? Is Google looking to make some sort of radical political statement? Is it ready to tank its stock valuation by overpaying for electricity? Hardly. Google has done the math and clean, renewable power makes the most business sense for the company. Take that, all you fossil fuel fanatics.

“We are convinced this is good for business, this is not about greenwashing. This is about locking in prices for us in the long term. Increasingly, renewable energy is the lowest cost option,” said Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google. “Our founders are convinced climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part.”

Last year, Google obtained 44% of its electrical energy from renewable sources. It started building to 100% renewables in 2012 and expects to get there before the end of next year. Oman said it had taken Google five years to reach the 100% target because of the complexity involved with negotiating power purchase agreements. “It’s complicated, it’s not for everyone: smaller companies will struggle with the documents. We are buying power in a lot of different jurisdictions, so you can’t just copy and paste agreements.”

Tech companies have grown so fast that they now account for nearly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivaling the aviation industry. To control how much energy it consumes, Google has begun using artificial intelligence to become more energy efficient. It says AI has cut its electricity usage by 15% — a huge accomplishment considering the company has 60,000 employees worldwide.

Oman said that while the falling price of solar and wind meant they had been the cheapest technologies to get to 100% by 2017, Google was now looking to sign 10 year agreements for low carbon power that was not intermittent, such as hydro, biomass and nuclear. “We want to do contracts with forms of renewable power that are more baseload-like, so low-impact hydro; it could be biomass if the fuel source is sustainable, it could be nuclear, God forbid, we’re not averse. We’re looking at all forms of low-carbon generation.”

December 6, 2016 0 comment

Going Solar PV Rooftop Solar Solar $Solar Modules

Cheapest Solar Panels? Google’s Project Sunroof Partners Compete For Your Signature

by Jake Richardson December 2, 2015

written by Jake Richardson

As we wrote months ago when it launched, Google has a free online service that uses its mapping information and partner offers from solar installers to try to hook you up with the cheapest solar panels on the market — by providing fast estimates of how much a homeowner might save by investing in a solar power system from various solar companies. Dubbed “Project Sunroof,” it also provides information on things like the number of square feet available for solar panels on your roof based on 3D modeling, the number of hours of usable sunlight per year based on weather pattern analysis, net savings over 20 years, an average monthly electric bill, and recommended solar power system size.

Currently, the Google service can provide information in the Boston area, the San Francisco area, Fresno, Napa, Sacramento, and Long Island. Partners for the project were not initially listed in the press releases, blog posts, and media coverage, so we decided to dig in and see who they are. Seeing offers from SunPower, American Solar Direct, Pick My Solar, Sungevity, SunEdison, NRG Home Solar, we can see that these are the highly regarded solar companies Google decided to partner with (in the initial San Francisco area where I live, at least).

Providing this information for free is a great service, because it brings rapid clarity to those who are curious or interested but don’t know how to gather basic information about what kind of solar power system might work with their home and how much they could save by going solar.

For example, do you know the square footage of your roof? Everyone knows how much they pay for their electricity each month, but you also know what size solar power system would cover your electricity usage?

December 2, 2015 1 comment

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Vivint Solar Teaming Up With Google For Project Sunroof

by Joshua S Hill August 21, 2015

written by Joshua S Hill

Following this weeks’s Project Roof announcement, Vivint Solar has revealed that it will be partnering with Google in the endeavour.

Google announced its latest 20% project earlier this week, the brainchild of Google employee Carl Elkin. Project Sunroof allows users to utilise “high-resolution aerial mapping (the same used by Google Earth) to help you calculate your roof’s solar energy potential, without having to climb up any ladders.” Currently only available in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, and Boston areas, Google isn’t shy about the project’s possible growth.

Right after that, without explaining much about exactly how, Vivint Solar revealed that it would be teaming up with Google for Project Sunroof.

In the press release, Vivint Solar repeats much about the Google project that we already know — by copying directly from the original Google Green Blog post. At the same time, however, its includes itself in the process.

“Vivint Solar teaming up with Google is giving homeowners across the country immediate insight, information and access to rooftop solar power—that’s good for everyone,” said Greg Butterfield, CEO of Vivint Solar.

Project Sunroof allows users to not only to gauge whether rooftop solar is a feasible option for their home, but it intends to also link the user with local solar providers — “like Vivint Solar.”

“Vivint Solar has created an incredible product that’s revolutionizing the energy market,” said Dwain Kinghorn, Chief Strategy and Innovations Officer at Vivint Solar. “It’s simple. It’s affordable. And together with Google, we’re able to let customers all over the country know that solar power is a lot simpler and more affordable than they might have thought.”

Presumably, Vivint Solar will provide Google with some direct access to facts and figures for their local development options, and will benefit from being a suggested choice by the tool itself.

Of course, it’s only a matter of time, then, before we see other solar companies in the US jumping on board, with competitors like SolarCity sure to join the partnership soon (if it hasn’t already).

August 21, 2015 0 comment

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Google Sunroof Predicts Solar Benefits

by Steve Hanley August 18, 2015

written by Steve Hanley

In what may be the greatest idea since sliced bread, the Google Sunroof program will let viewers see exactly how much sunlight strikes their roof every year and calculate how much they could save with rooftop solar panels. Once you put in your address, you will be told how much you are likely to save in energy costs and be put in touch with a local installer.

Google Maps already has satellite, navigation, and sunlight data for every property in the world, so it knows how much sunlight hits a roof on a daily basis. The program will begin in Boston, San Francisco, and Fresno and could spread like sunlight at dawn to every rooftop in the world. Wow!

Sunroof is intended as a “treasure map” for future green energy projects, telling you how much of a saving you’d make and how long it will take to make back your initial investment.

The folks at Engadget tested the service on the AOL building in San Francisco. Sunroof said the roof received 1,840 hours of usable sunlight per year and calculated that about 15,641 square feet were available to install solar panels. Next, it evaluated the options and reported that AOL could save $14,000 if it leased the hardware, or $24,000 if it bought a system outright.

Imagine the possibilities. No more contacting a bunch of different solar installers and waiting months for someone to come inspect your roof to tell you whether a rooftop solar system would be right for you. Now you can do all that from the comfort of your living room using your own computer. Google will calculate your savings for you automatically.

Sunroof will also let you know if your rooftop is not a suitable candidate for solar, which applies to perhaps half of all roofs around the world. Some face the wrong way, some have too much shade, and some have the wrong pitch to be effective.

Information is power, so they say. Now, information can tell you quickly and easily how much power you can generate using your very own roof. Google Sunroof could revolutionize the home solar industry.

August 18, 2015 0 comment

Going Solar Other Renewable Energy Rooftop Solar Solar Records

SolarCity Hits Record 4GWh/Day Energy Generation

by Aisha Abdelhamid March 23, 2015

written by Aisha Abdelhamid

Barely one year after breaking previous solar energy generation records, SolarCity is again hitting new highs. Recently exceeding 4GWh of solar electricity produced in one day, SolarCity is triumphant. “The best part?” asks SolarCity, “Our customers didn’t have to burn anything, use a drop of water, or emit an ounce of carbon dioxide to produce this power. This is what the future looks like.”

Screenshot from homepage gallery © SolarCity

4GWh is the same as 4,000 megawatt-hours (MWh), or 4,000,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh). SolarCity reports that the average U.S. home uses around 12,069 kWh of electricity per year. This works out to an average of 33 kWh per day. Now put that 33 kWh on a graph beside 4 million kWh in one day, and you can really feel the triumph beaming from SolarCity headquarters these days.

SolarCity – “Transforming the Way Americans Use Energy”

Founded in 2006, SolarCity® (NASDAQ: SCTY) has tens of thousands of customers in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington, and Washington D.C. “Transforming the way Americans use energy,” SolarCity lives up to its motto, currently providing “one out of every four new solar electricity systems nationwide.”

Revolutionizing utility choices across the nation, SolarCity has grown to become America’s largest solar energy provider. Offering clean, renewable energy to homeowners, businesses, schools, non-profits, and government organizations, SolarCity makes the transition simple for its customers, guaranteeing the electricity production of its solar energy systems. Installing systems to the highest engineering standards, customers receive a cleaner, more affordable alternative to burning fossil fuels, such as natural gas, coal, or oil.

SolarCity truck. © Mike Mozart, Flickr

With one of the most experienced clean energy project design and installation teams in the world, SolarCity performs the entire process, from permitting through installation. A SolarCity website statement points out, “We are the only company that offers integrated sales, financing, design, installation, monitoring and efficiency services from a single source, without requiring the services of multiple third-parties.” Project management and performance monitoring systems scale to support millions of users, according to SolarCity, and provide customers with a real-time view of their net energy consumption, as well as their carbon footprint.

Coming to a Wal-Mart Near You

Along with tens of thousands of homeowners, SolarCity also has commercial solar energy systems installed on more than 400 schools, including Stanford University. Government agencies are among the company’s clients as well, such as the U.S. Armed Forces, and Department of Homeland Security. Well-known corporate clients include eBay, HP, Intel, Walgreens and Wal-Mart.

wal-mart project - screenshot from solarcity.com

Screenshot of Wal-Mart project from SolarCity.com

SolarCity has 190 Wal-Mart stores already installed or underway in Arizona, California, Colorado, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, and New York. Website statements report that the solar energy systems are saving from 5-30 percent of each store’s electricity costs, and are responsible for an annual reduction of 106,244,231 pounds of CO2.

SolarCity Records in the Making

SolarCity’s stated mission is to “accelerate the mass adoption of clean energy.” With 4GWh of solar energy generation a day, this is clearly already happening. Now the next record SolarCity is aiming to hit is its one millionth customer. And with the recent news that SolarCity has teamed up with DIRECTV, as well as with Google, this record is clearly already in the making, too.

4GWh Day Solar Energy Generation. Screenshot from SolarCity.com

March 23, 2015 0 comment

Rooftop solar installation. Photo by TIM WIMBORNE/Reuters/Corbis

Going Solar PV Rooftop Solar Solar $

Google & SolarCity Create $750 Million Solar Fund

by Steve Hanley March 21, 2015

written by Steve Hanley

Google and SolarCity have teamed up to create a $750,000,000 fund to promote affordable residential solar installations. The new fund will cover the upfront cost of solar panel installations for thousands of homeowners in 14 states and the District of Columbia, and make it possible for them to pay less for solar power than they pay for electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Rooftop solar installation. Photo by TIM WIMBORNE/Reuters/Corbis “We’re happy to support SolarCity’s mission to help families reduce their carbon footprint and energy costs,” said Sidd Mundra, Renewable Energy Principal at Google. “It’s good for the environment, good for families and also makes good business sense.”

Google has committed $300 million to the new fund—its largest renewable energy investment to date. The new fund is the largest of its kind ever created for residential solar power, and the second such collaboration between the two companies. The new fund is designed for home owners who need help with the down payment they need to obtain a solar system. It will apply to both leased and purchased systems.

The goal of the collaboration between Google and SolarCity is to show homeowners that solar power is not only environmentally friendly, it also costs less than electricity from traditional fossil fuel sources. The myth that solar is much more expensive has been promoted by the fossil fuel industries for decades, just the way self-interested parties promote the myth that climate change is not associated with human activity.

It’s all abut democratizing solar and making it more accessible to middle income families, Jonathan Bass, SolarCity’s vice president of communications, told The Week recently. “It’s an equation with a few variables,” Bass explained. Those include the local cost of retail electricity, which is higher in some areas of the country than others, and differences in sun exposure in different regions. Differences in state and local financial incentives and building codes also figure into the mix.

With the help of Google, SolarCity plans to reach 25,000 new households and add 500 megawatts in new capacity. That represents a significant increase to their current customer base of 190,000 and 1,000 megawatts of capacity as of the end of 2014.

“If you can lower my overall energy bill — if I pay less for solar than I’m paying for utility power today, with no out of pocket costs up front — that’s something I’d love to do,'” Bass says. “Those are homeowners that really value $20, $40 a month in savings. That can add up to thousands of dollars over the years.”

In other words, the program is designed to say to potential new solar customers, “If you could, why wouldn’t you?” It’s a nothing to lose and everything to gain proposition. In the larger sense, this initiative will go a long way to proving to the world that solar power really is the most economical choice when it comes to providing electrical power for our homes.

Photo Credit: Tim Wimbourne/Reuters/Corbis/Creative Commons

March 21, 2015 2 comments

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Cleantech Talk #2: Tesla Home Battery, Big Companies Like Apple, Google, & IKEA Going Solar, & More

by Zach February 26, 2015

written by Zach

Also published on CleanTechnica, EV Obsession, & GAS2.

Chris DeMorro and I recorded our second “Cleantech Talk” podcast earlier today. It is embedded below for your listening pleasure. I’ve begun the process of getting the podcast included on iTunes, but it’s a bit complicated, so I didn’t want to wait for that to be complete to share this week’s episode. However, I did notice that the default setting on SoundCloud is to not allow downloading of the podcast, so I went and changed that in order to allow you to download the podcast in case that is a better option for some of you (the download button is in the top right-hand corner of the embedded podcast below).

Whether you use an Apple or Android device, though, note that you can easily listen to the podcast via the SoundCloud app (Apple app here, and Google Play app here).

With those details out of the way, here’s this week’s episode:

In case you need a preview of the topics in order to make a decision whether you want to listen or not, we discussed these stories:

The Fisker Karma Is Dead, Long Live…Elux?
Electric Cars Under Attack Ahead Of 2016 Presidential Campaigns
Tesla Home Battery On The Way
Will The Tesla Gigafactory Turn On Early?
Big corporations switching to solar & wind (such as Apple, Google, IKEA…)

If you missed last week’s inaugural episode, check it out here: “Cleantech Talk” Podcast #1: Apple Electric Cars, Tesla Model X Spy Pics, Formula E, & Chevy Bolt.

February 26, 2015 1 comment

Investment Rooftop Solar

Apple, Verizon, Google, UPS: American Corporations Investing More In Solar Power

by Jake Richardson September 3, 2014

written by Jake Richardson

Verizon, Wal-Mart, Apple, Kohl’s, Google, UPS, GM, IKEA: these are just some of the American corporations utilizing solar power now. You may have noticed some of them are America’s most mainstream companies. Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet used to be a common advertising slogan. Chevy was and is a mainstream American brand.

In June, it was reported that GM planned to install three acres of solar panels in Michigan. Last year, GM had 1.8 MW of solar installed at a Toledo plant.

Kohl’s has even more solar power. This retail chain has 156 locations with solar, over 380 LEED certified buildings and over seventy EV charging stations. Wal-Mart is the largest commercial owner of solar, but this fact might be slightly misleading because Wal-Mart is also such a large company. Even if it gets a tiny percentage of its electricity from solar, that total amount might be huge compared to smaller companies’ clean energy technology.

Verizon has invested almost $140 million in renewable energy, “By almost doubling the amount of renewable, solar energy we’re using, we are making further progress toward Verizon’s goal of cutting our carbon intensity in half by 2020, in part, by leveraging the proven business case for clean-energy alternatives to the commercial power grid,” explained James Gowen, Verizon’s chief sustainability officer.

Last year, the Motley Fool wrote that Wal-Mart had some solar power at 200 of its 4500 stores. Two hundred stores sounds impressive, but it is less than 5%, meaning that about 95% of Wal-Mart stores did not have solar power. Still, solar power has been attractive enough for even his mainstream retail giant to invest in it. Wal-Mart’s green activities might get more press, but IKEA’s percentage of locations with solar power was well over 80% in 2013. Obviously, 80-90% is much greater than 4-5% but Wal-Mart still gets credit as a leader in solar power sometimes.

“There has to be a rational business decision with a decent payback. Any business with access to capital has a choice of where to invest. Of course, you can invest in growth of business, and we do that, but we also look at what delivers long-term energy security, a macro hedge on energy price rises and addresses carbon. IKEA also has a long-term business philosophy, where we own most of our stores, our factories, and the land they are built on. We have the capital, so why would we rent? It’s the same with energy – if we can own our own energy production why would we not want to do it?”, said an IKEA executive.

It has been demonstrated by a number of mainstream American corporations that investing in clean energy can save money. In fact, about one billion dollars a year has been. So, will solar power become as American as hot dogs and apple pie?

Image Credit: Joe Ravi

September 3, 2014 2 comments

PV Solar $Solar Incentives Solar Policy Solar Projects

Google Invests In Its 13th Renewable Energy Project, 265.7 MW Solar Power Plant

by James Ayre October 16, 2013

written by James Ayre

Google is investing $103 million dollars into the 265.7 MW Mount Signal Solar project in California that’s being developed by solar developer Silver Ridge Power. The move represents yet another large investment into the renewable energy sector by the tech giant.

The partnership between Silver Ridge Power and Google was announced on October 10 and marks the 13th time that Google has invested in a utility-scale renewable energy project, raising its total monetary investment in such projects, to date, to over one billion dollars and 2 gigawatts (GW) of power capacity.

Image Credit: Google/Silver Ridge Power

October 16, 2013 0 comment