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.
RoofRay is a tool that helps you figure out whether it's worth plunking down on money to put solar panels on your roof. If you've long been contemplating going solar to stick it to the man, this tool will give you a fairly rough estimate of how much efficiency you can expect and how it will affect your monthly bills based on past weather conditions, monthly power bills, the slope of your house, and how much paneling you can cram onto your roof.
It does most all of this with the help of Google Maps. It's one of the smarter mashups we've seen, calculating the square footage of your roof based on Google's satellite and aerial imagery. Building the virtual panels is actually the hardest part, as it will do all the numbers-crunching for you--including how long it will take to break even on the paneling, permit fees, installation and upkeep. These are all things that could cost a quarter or more of what you paid for your house.
Short of getting a professional estimate from a solar panel provider this is a pretty straightforward means of seeing if it's worth the investment. However, I'm still a little unsure of its capability to figure out exact efficiencies, or factor in the four hours a day when your neighbor's trees are blocking all that precious bill-paying sun.
Update: If you're interested in giving this a go you should check out Sungevity. Former News.com editor Michael Kanellos covered it back in April, and it does pretty much the same thing as RoofRay with a little more precision due to the inclusion of multiple angles from the aerial photography. It also hooks you up with a proper quote and installation so you don't have to do the legwork when it comes time to get the panels put in.
[via Lifehacker and BoingBoing Gadgets]
Figure out where you can fit solar paneling to make your very own array. RoofRay will do its best to calculate how well it will do up on your lonely roof.
(Credit: CBS Interactive)
Danny Kennedy may have come up with a way to make solar panels an impulse buy.
Sungevity, Kennedy's company, has come up with a Web-based system for evaluating the solar potential for a given home through satellite data. Customers log onto Sungevity's site and provide an address and some information about their monthly electrical bill.
Within 24 hours, the company sends customers a quote for installing a solar system, an estimate of how much the system will save them over 25 years, the prospective increase in the value of their home, and simulated imagery of what their home might look like after solar panels are installed. Traditionally, the process that provides all that information takes days and a physical examination of the roof.
"We do all that (the calculations for preparing the estimate) in about 10 to 15 minutes," he said.
Your solar system, Sir! Click a few buttons and Sungevity gives you an accurate quote for a solar system. It cuts out a lot of the time and money of putting these in.
(Credit: Sungevity)And in a few more clicks, customers can schedule an appointment and put a deposit down on a solar system.
I did an estimate on my grandmother's home. The system would provide 25 percent of the home's power and cost $7,511 after rebates. It would save $27,360 in electrical cost over time, according to the quote. They gave the option of paying upfront or through installments. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are accepted for the deposit. The quote came back two hours after I handed over the address.
Reducing a complex sale into a quick online exchange--the same trick that propelled Dell to the front of the PC world--helps reduce one of the nagging costs of the solar world: the install expenses. Installation costs come to around roughly half of the cost of a solar system. Sharp, Akeena, and other companies have tried to reduce installation costs through prefabricated frames for solar panels. Others have developed roof tiles with solar cells built in. SolarCity, meanwhile, has aggressively used software to coordinate solar panel deliveries and installations to cut down on the number of trips electricians and contractors have to make. SolarCity also leases solar panels.
Sungevity's software essentially eliminates the money and time it takes for an installer to drive out to someone's house, climb on top of it, and take a bunch of measurements to prepare an estimate. Only 10 percent of those visits lead to a sale, Kennedy added.
In all, Sungevity can cut the cost of a solar system by around 10 percent, he said, and cut out 80 percent of the on-site estimates. (Like Solar City, Sungevity also uses software to coordinate installations.)
The company's secret sauce is a trigonometry-heavy application that can take satellite imagery and create a 3D model of a house. From the model, Sungevity calculates the pitch of the roof, the azimuth (for instance, where the house faces in relation to compass points) and the available area.
"You introduce errors when you put a guy on the roof," Kennedy asserted.
Sungevity uses data from Microsoft Virtual Earth rather than Google Earth for its satellite imagery. Google Earth only provides a top-down view of a roof. Virtual Earth gives data from different angles, which lets Sungevity calculate pitch.
The data provides enough information to provide a fairly strong estimate even without customer input, he said. To prove its point, Sungevity is going to mail fliers to all of the homes in Albany, Calif. Each flier will come with a picture of the home that goes with the address on the flier, a picture of the home with simulated solar panels, and the cost savings. (To fine-tune the estimate, customers need to submit their power bills.) The company has largely been operating under the radar since it started in December.
Rather than install custom solar panel systems, Sungevity offers five different systems, ranging in size from 1.4 kilowatts to 5.6 kilowatts. Prices range from $7,500 to $38,500 for everything after rebates are subtracted.
While operating only in California right now, the company will try to expand to other states. It may employ solar installers as subcontractors in other states, or it may sell estimating services for installers in other states.
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