Green Tech

A new set of layers for Google Earth is trying to make it easier for solar and wind farm developers to figure out where they are least and most likely to be challenged.

The Path to Green Energy, as the Google Earth tool is called, provides information on lands legally prohibited from commercial development, on natural habitats of endangered species, and on lands proposed for inclusion into the federal wilderness system.

The tool was developed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the National Audubon Society with sponsorship from Google.org's Geo Challenge Grants. The grants program provides nonprofits with money to develop Google Earth tools. Each group receives a $25,000 grant to gather and organize data from within its own organization and from government agencies, including wildlife, game, and fish commissions.

The Path to Green Energy tool, which went live Wednesday, is freely available to the public and currently covers the Western states and the Dakotas.

The tool shows 14 types of areas within three main categories of land protection. Layers can be turned on individually or seen in merged views.

Path to Green Energy tool breaks land protections into three main categories: prohibited, restricted, and "should be avoided."

(Credit: Google Earth)

Representatives from the groups said in a teleconference Wednesday that they see the Path to Green Energy maps as a proactive step in reaching out to energy developers before disputes arise over sensitive areas.

Locating environmentally responsible sites "will expedite rather than delay proposals (and) help gain widespread support for a project. It makes good business sense where your chances of getting approval quicker are better," said Johanna Wald, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Environmentalists, too, want to see renewable energy projects like solar and wind farms go up quickly, and don't want to be tied up in legal battles or prevent progress any more than developers do, according to Wald.

"It will minimize permitting periods, conflict, and oppositions, which in turn will get us where we need to go: more renewable energy in people's homes," said Brian Rutledge, executive director of Audubon Wyoming.

The maps are timely since Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is putting together a federal task force to investigate which public lands could be used for renewable energy generation and transmission. On March 11, Salazar said that the Bureau of Land Management had identified 21 million acres of public land with wind energy potential in Western states, 29 million acres in Southwestern states with solar energy potential, and 140 million acres in Western states and Alaska with geothermal resource potential.

Wald said the Path to Green Energy tool might be useful for researching that task.

After years of confusion and controversy between developers and environmentalists throughout Wyoming, for example, a pilot version of the tool was used to identify habitats of the Greater Sage Grouse population. A current layer in Google now shows the lands that were signed into protection by Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal's executive order last August, while another shows grouse breeding density./p>

"In terms of the potential cost savings, they will be enormous. Anyone who is in the transmission or renewable energy business talks about cost in terms of money, time, and getting these approvals. Sometimes that can take far longer than the build-out process. So if we can streamline that process, it can help enormously," said David Bercovich, program manager at Google.org.

Path to Green Energy tool in Google Earth showing grouse breeding density and lands protected by the Wyoming governor's executive order.

(Credit: Google Earth)

Homeowners who dream of their electric meter spinning backward may seek solar panels to slash bills and carbon emissions. But where to start?

Before you call a contractor, these sites can assist with the early steps, like summing up what you could spend or save in your neighborhood.

The pioneering San Francisco Solar Map offers personalized evaluations.

San Francisco Solar Map

The San Francisco Solar Map helps locals lay their solar plans. A Google map pegs projects already up and running. Type in your address for estimates of installation fees and long-term utility bill savings and to find installers listed by the California Energy Commission.

Fog City's municipal rebates, added to state and federal incentives, probably make it the least expensive place for homeowners and businesses to add photovoltaics. Residents taking advantage of all discounts might drop the hardware and construction costs from, say, $25,000 to $7,000. The Web site supports Mayor Gavin Newsom's goal of 10,000 solar rooftops by 2012. It's the work of the San Francisco Department of the Environment and CH2M Hill, a consulting firm.

Solar Boston's map displays the solar potential for an address or even a city block.

Solar Boston

Mayor Thomas Menino's Solar Boston project aims to ramp up installations from half a megawatt to 25 megawatts by 2015. Its Flash-based map tracks solar, wind, biomass, and hydropower sources around town. You can enter an address, select a building, or even highlight an area on the map, to view the potential in dollars and kilowatts for topping roofs with photovoltaics.

Both San Francisco and Boston belong to the Department of Energy's Solar America Cities initiative to fast-track the spread of solar power. The two cities' maps are early, model tools. I'd also like to see peer comments and Yelp-like ratings of services and products. And I'd expect such services to help consumers share tips and report about the longest-lasting equipment as the solar sector matures. For instance, I found more than three dozen installers within 30 miles of my San Francisco apartment, but I'd have to do research elsewhere to decide whom to trust.

How do solar panels affect a home's resale value? Somebody should integrate solar maps with real estate listings, in the style of Trulia or Zillow.

Cooler Planet's maps include regional incentives around the country to estimate solar costs and savings.

Cooler Planet

Cooler Planet's solar maps cover territory from coast to coast. Google Maps mashups from the Seattle environmental marketing firm chart solar rebates, existing installations, costs and savings, and installers around the country. We learned that photovoltaic panels atop a three-flat in Chicago, where only federal incentives are available, could halve the $300 monthly electric bill and pay for themselves after 28 years.

Cooler Planet also rates solar incentives by state, painting Louisiana and Oregon as surprisingly bright. Another map tracks the growth of solar in California since 1999.

Choose your building, and Sungevity will create an estimate of its solar potential.

Sungevity

Sungevity asks you to pick your San Francisco Bay-area building on a map and describe the roofing material in exchange for an e-mail quote of solar costs. Technology from Microsoft Virtual Earth enables the company to take into account the angle of a roof, which affects the light available to solar panels throughout the day. That could lead to fewer measurements in person, saving time and money.

RoofRay relies on your rooftop drawing to figure a slanted roof into its cost estimates.

RoofRay

RoofRay also looks at the slant of a roof, although with less precision than Sungevity. Locate your building on a Google Map, draw an outline of the roof, and estimate the pitch. RoofRay asks for your average monthly electric bill, then spells out a detailed financial analysis. The site requires registration and asks for snail mail and e-mail addresses with a phone number. To put an interactive RoofRay widget on a blog, code is available for a quick cut-and-paste.

This rapidly-growing grassroots effort aims to get more than One Block off the Grid.

1BOG

San Franciscans Sylvia Ventura and Dan Barahona launched One Block Off the Grid in June to help bring cheaper solar power to the people. The effort organizes homeowners to bargain together with businesses to drive down the costs of installation. Several dozen people who joined the first campaign enjoyed savings of up to 40 percent, according to 1BOG.

Last week, the couple sold their nonprofit to Virgance, a social media and activism start-up. The 1,153-member solar effort has spread to 20 cities. It's even taking a stab at solar agreements between tenants and landlords. Neighborhood Solar is a similar grassroots purchasing program in Denver, where 1BOG is establishing a toehold.

Wattbot's recommendations of cleaner energy technologies are set to launch in January.

Wattbot

Wattbot, which remains in preview testing, promises custom evaluations in January to help households save money and carbon emissions. Share your address, and it will detail potential energy-efficiency and renewable technologies for your address. More than a solar-referral tool, it will also evaluate the financial impact of modest tweaks, like swapping old lightbulbs with compact fluorescents. You'll be able to contact service providers, take notes on projects, and connect with fellow users.

For now, there's just a simple U.S. heat map of renewable energy adoption. Wattbot is also building a service for clean-tech companies to track sales leads and get market research. The planned features, if realized, could make this site a unique hub in the clean-energy, green-building marketplace.

This post was updated to add a more detailed image of a quote from Sungevity.

Companies seeking to establish solar power farms around protected wildlife areas can face a long, byzantine government permitting process. Why not set up utility-scale, renewable energy in polluted zones instead?

That's what the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing. Its map for Google Earth show the potential for solar, wind, and biomass plants across 480,000 sites marred by toxic industrial waste and mining.

Interactive EPA maps for Google Earth expand on the data shown here.

(Credit: EPA)

The agency says 850,000 acres it has cleaned up, among 15 million contaminated acres total, are exceptional destinations for clean-power companies, in part due to the low cost and existing infrastructure there. Plus, brownfields, former mines, and Superfund sites are unattractive for most commercial and residential development, especially in rural areas.

Demand for cleaner forms of energy will expand by 31 percent over the next quarter-century, according to the Department of Energy. Its National Renewable Energy Laboratory worked with the EPA to suggest destinations for green-energy projects.

However, the Christian Science Monitor and others voice concern about the safety of workers who would build and staff these renewable-energy plants.

Early in 2007 the EPA made data about toxic wastelands available for the public to map with Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey is also online, in formats including XML and RSS.

Which parts of the United States emit the most global-warming gases? The best view until now came via satellites, which could capture only snapshots at about the state level. Total carbon emissions were known, but their distribution remained a mystery.

That changed on Monday with the release of the most detailed map to date of U.S. carbon emissions from fossil fuels.

With this U.S. map of carbon dioxide emissions complete, researchers next hope to conquer the world.

(Credit: Vulcan Project)

The map, by the Vulcan Project, took more than two years to complete and cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars, with backing from NASA and the Department of Energy. The result, named after the Roman god of fire, is 100 times more detailed than earlier imagery, according to its researchers.

"We knew that the previous emissions inventory of fossil fuels probably wasn't perfect, but we were a little surprised at how far off it was," said Kevin Gurney, a Purdue University assistant professor of earth and atmospheric science, who led the project. Additional researchers come from Colorado State University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

They pooled together data from 2002 about carbon dioxide originating from power plants, roads, factories, businesses, and homes, and illustrated how the gas travels across land and oceans.

The overview map (above) appears at first to correlate emissions with population density. However, closer inspection reveals surprises, such as carbon dioxide clustered in semirural areas of the Southeastern United States, where manufacturing has shifted from the Northeast and Midwest.

"We've pushed power plants to where people don't live, so emissions have gotten spread out. Interstates run out in the middle of nowhere," Gurney said.

His team built a software program from the ground up to produce a video (see below) that shows great plumes of carbon dioxide trailing off from Southern California into the Pacific Ocean, and spreading from the northeast into the North Atlantic. Three-dimensional views display how thunderstorms and other weather patterns influence the migration of emissions.

The data is expected to be paired with findings from the Orbital Carbon Observatory satellite, set to launch in December to collect data about carbon in the Earth's atmosphere.

Gurney said he has been inundated with calls from lawmakers, businesses, and software makers seeking details and offering suggestions related to the Vulcan Project. The data available for download, for instance, could help support sophisticated carbon-trading programs.

"If we can show the reality of emissions and potential for people to change by buying hybrid cars, putting insulation on their homes, then this would be a great way to interact with consumers," Gurney said.

His team's next ambitious effort is the Hestia Project, a global map and climate portal named for the Greek goddess of the hearth.

"We want to make it even finer, to the individual-building level, and put it down to a 3-D, Google Earth kind of system that would allow people to zoom in anywhere," Gurney said. "Numbers in a table just do not connect with people. When they see their world and house--a photorealistic view--it resonates with their lives."

Next month, the Hestia Project, which is collecting partners and funding, will launch a prototype to track Indianapolis. Gurney aims to have that city mapped within a year or two. As a contrast, he hopes to focus on a city in China before mapping the planet.

Over the long term, a system ideally should take into account other global-warming gases, such as methane, in addition to measuring land use and carbon sequestration efforts, he said.