Called Project Sunroof, this video demonstrates how Google came up with the idea.
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To tally how much you’ll save, the project uses data from Google Maps, calculating how much sunlight a particular roof receives throughout the day, as well as numbers on usable sunlight hours per year and how much space you have for solar panels. And then it considers local electricity rates and solar incentives to compute an estimate for net savings with a 20-year lease.
Project Sunroof has commenced its pilot program in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno, Calif. and Boston with the promise to make it more widely available in the coming months.
The design was led by “proud solar geek” Carl Elkin, who works in Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass. Some of the more famous tools said to have been produced through 20 percent time include Gmail and Adsense. He’s now working full-time on Project Sunroof. Certainly many of them are missing out on a chance to save money and be green. If you’re already convinced, click through to see solar providers in your area. “One begins to wonder, ‘What’s holding people back?’ We believe it’s because people don’t realize how cheap it is”.
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The programme takes into account factors such as the orientation of the roof, shade from trees and buildings and local weather patterns. Users enter zillions of solar-related questions into the engine on a daily basis, so the company decided to build a tool that makes going solar easier than ever. President Obama also announced a new plan in early July to install solar panels on low-income households in an effort to power poor neighborhoods with technology that’s otherwise financially unobtainable. In 2007, the company “installed the largest corporate solar panel installation of its kind – 1.7 MW at our Mountain View campus”, Google stated on its website.
