The Google Sunroof Project is an initiative started by Engineer Carl Elkin to map the planet's solar potential. One roof at a time, the project has already expanded to nine major cities in the United States of America.
Google's mission is to organize world information and make it useful and accessible. In the beginning, the mission looked like catalogs and search rankings for web pages. As of this moment, the tech giant has expanded and has ventured from cyberspace to reality with projects like Google Books, Google Maps, Google X and so on.
The latest Google venture is Project Sunroof by Elkin. This is a website that makes it easier for homeowners to know more about solar energy and solar panels, whether they should go solar or not and be aware of the costs and benefits of installing such technology in households.
In order to provide precise estimates for homeowners and building owners, Project Sunroof utilizes a set of unique information that accesses the amount of sunlight a roof gets, area orientation, trees, shade, buildings nearby and climate patterns. These are only a few information incorporated in the project's algorithm to create solar scores for each and every rooftop it maps out. Buildings and homeowners alike can then provide their average energy costs in comparison to Google's solar computations. Not only people can learn whether their house or establishment is good for solar energy but also determine if spending money for installing solar panels will pay off for a long period of time. In summary, the project can foresee the effects of the Sun and heat for calculating a person's budget.
The tech giant sees this trial as an aggregator. In every process made, Google will refer its customers to solar panel installers that operate in the vicinity. The project works like a travel and insurance aggregator like TripAdvisor and Expedia that will give advanced comparisons so that people would not need to go to a handful of websites just to make comparisons.
The first Project Sunroof launch was limited only to three areas in the United States. With renewable energy now being the trend to fight climate change, the project is now beginning to be a useful service and has already expanded to nine other areas in the U.S., namely, New York, Nevada, Connecticut, California, North Carolina, Arizona, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Colorado.
