Google your House With Project Sunroof to See if you Should Go Solar

Google has put itself on the map by funding more than $2 billion in renewable energy projects. Now Google has released an online tool that advises homeowners about how much money they can save by installing solar panels.

Titled, Project Sunroof, the recently released online tool will allow you to type your address and find out how much space you have for solar panels on your roof, how many hours of rooftop sunlight you will get in a year and how much money you can save.

Google your House With Project Sunroof to See if you Should Go Solar

Barry Fischer, a Google spokesperson explains,

[pull_quote_center]“As Google, we knew we had the expertise to do this well using Google maps and aerial imaging, ‘Project Sunroof’ draws upon the same high-resolution imagery that powers Google Earth.”[/pull_quote_center]

After you type in your address, a Google Earth image of your home and the surrounding neighborhood appears, with the roofs appearing in colors ranging from purple to yellow to indicate how much sunlight is striking on the surface. The photos, however, appear in some cases to be at least one or two years old.

Similar tool is also developed by City and state governments, the United States Department of Energy, and solar installers which enable the homeowners to type in their address and determine how much solar power they would get from a photovoltaic system.

Fischer said.

[pull_quote_center]“Based on our testing, we found that using machine-learning techniques alone helped reduce classification errors by 75 per cent compared to using traditional methods of determining the boundaries of buildings and rooftops,”[/pull_quote_center]

This tool is currently available only to the residents of San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, and Fresno, California. But Google plans to make the tool more widely available all around the world.

Fischer said:

[pull_quote_center]During the coming months we’ll be exploring how to make the tool better and more widely available,”[/pull_quote_center]