Project Sunroof

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof#

by Navarr • 11 years ago

389 218 11 years ago

Navarr3• 11 years ago

Introduction Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BXf_h8tEes

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

A better link, although I find it interesting that this is primarily an advertising play. Take information they have (Google maps) and turn it into a "qualified lead" system for Solar installers. Has to pay pretty decently on a conversion.

That said, it would be super helpful if they marked addresses as "already have solar" so I would stop getting robo-calls from solar companies trying to sell me solar panels.

jdalgetty• 11 years ago

Not available in Canada it seems

alwaysdoit• 11 years ago

Project Sunroof is currently helping people save with solar in the following cities: San Francisco Bay Area, Fresno CA and Greater Boston MA.

mikerg87• 11 years ago

Currently only Fresno, Bay Area and Boston. The list of locations they have processed is not prominent and a bit washed out between the white lettering and the bright background image.

Navarr3• 11 years ago

Not even available in most of the US.

It's a "start"

kuschku4• 11 years ago

No, like, in Canada and Europe the site just returns 404.

aps-sids• 11 years ago

It's a 404.

LoneWolf• 11 years ago

same here.

miyuru• 11 years ago

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/about/

giarc• 11 years ago

Off topic but the Google Sunroof logo is very similar to MyHealth program logo in my province (https://myhealth.alberta.ca/).

Mithaldu3• 11 years ago

Dear Google, you make me feel really uncomfortable when you share a video with the world wherein you describe a project which you will make for "the country".

srtjstjsj• 11 years ago

Where does it say "the country" ?

Mithaldu3• 11 years ago

Look for the youtube video. They say it at the end.

magicalist2• 11 years ago

Do you really mean "uncomfortable"? I don't get it. Annoyed maybe? (like when new products don't come to Apps users)

OTOH, just because you have a generally accessible url, the video at that url must be addressed to the world?

Mithaldu3• 11 years ago

No, i'm not annoyed. I understand why they can't offer it globally right from the start.

It's the wording itself that makes me feel uncomfortable in a way that is hard to articulate.

shogun21• 11 years ago

So Google isn't trying to replicate Solar City, this is just an analysis tool if your home would be viable for solar panels. Almost like a middle-man for solar panel providers?

melling2• 11 years ago

They are simply trying to reduce the resistance to solar energy adoption. If people can perform discovery and analysis in a fraction of the time, those who will benefit will more likely do it. Take a 10 hour process and reduce it to 30 minutes, for example. Same idea as a one-click checkout.

bri3d• 11 years ago

They're also trying to make money. Warm, qualified solar leads are worth hundreds or more.

vishalzone2002• 11 years ago

would be amazing to see sunroof and tesla power wall combine efforts on this...

kirk21• 11 years ago

How do they make these maps? Do they have satellite images of different points of (sunny) days and run the analysis that way?

ww520• 11 years ago

Extrapolation. Use the time on the satellite photo to get the time reference, and thus where the sun is and how much sunlight going at a direction. Use the location and direction of the house get a sense of the facing of the roof. Use color level of the bright and shade sides to estimate the roof pitch incline. Given the roof's area, direction, and pitch, it's not hard to estimate the sun light received.

ucaetano• 11 years ago

Far easier, they have 3D models of all the buildings already, as well as weather info. They just need to determine what is roof, and calculate the exposure.

vblord• 11 years ago

Wow. I can't believe how expensive solar panels are. This really is a great tool to give you an idea how much solar panels would cost. What about wind... does anyone know of any affordable residential wind turbine solutions?

jpollock• 11 years ago

Residential wind has some issues:

1) Performance - best performance is when the wind blows in a straight line, houses and other features will deflect it making it turbulent.

2) Noise - turbines are noisy, you're not likely to have neighbors appreciate it.

3) Mounting - Mounting one requires either a pole, or it can be mounted to the roof. However, roof mountings tend to cause issues (read damage) due to vibrations transferred through the mounting.

Not good for a residential neighborhood, but perhaps if you've got several acres of clear land?

wereHamster• 11 years ago

Aren't there turbines with a vertical shaft, which don't need a large tower? I saw one a few months ago, built especially for city rooftops where you don't have that much space and generally need something not that expensive. You'd still have the problem of turbulences though (i.e. non-optimal performance generation)

lotharbot• 11 years ago

under Solar City's finance model (and possibly others) payments on solar panels are less than buying the same amount of electricity off the grid. That includes maintenance on the panels for 30 years.

This is assuming you get adequate sunlight, which we do here in Denver.

swalsh• 11 years ago

Weird, it says it covers Boston but when I put my Boston address (single family in the city of Boston itself) it says they haven't reached the address yet.

arscan• 11 years ago

I live just outside Boston and it worked for me (although it did consider my deck as part of my roof, which grossly inflated the estimate). Technically, they say "greater Boston area", so perhaps they don't actually include Boston itself.

distantsounds• 11 years ago

I put in my Medford address and got results. I don't own, but it's still interesting to see.

sisk• 11 years ago

Worked for me and my building is next to Copley. But Boston is very fragmented when it comes to service distribution—just see the broadband provider map:

http://consumermediallc.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/bos_cabl...

dicroce2• 11 years ago

I put in an address and it couldn't find it... Then I cleared it out and put in the address more slowly... When I did that I noticed that it found it in the drop down... so I selected it and THEN it worked... It seems like unless you put in EXACTLY what they have in the DB, it won't work... (in my case, I left off the "avenue" in my address).

JoshuaEddy• 11 years ago

Try http://www.mapdwell.com/en/boston . The City of Boston has already done a solar survey with the MIT spinoff MapDwell.

andyl4• 11 years ago

Fusion of maps, 3d modeling, electricity & lease rates, solar intensity, installers. Easy to use. This feels like something new and powerful.

For society: I wonder if it is safe for so much power to be concentrated in one organization.

As a technical accomplishment: I'm impressed.

TeMPOraL2• 11 years ago

For society: I wonder if it is safe for so much power to be concentrated in one organization.

In general, it's probably not. But in this particular case it's been working very well for us so far.

dkhenry• 11 years ago

Its not really new, and its not really powerful. From what I can see all this does is give you an estimate based on the square footage of your rooftop. There is a lot more that goes into a real estimate then how big your roof is, namely how can you arrange the panels to cover the roof. That is a neat trick and this company does that http://www.modsolar.net/

I worked with their stack for a bit and from my understanding their tool has been doing what this site does and then some extra stuff to actually get the panels installed.

rconti2• 11 years ago

And sun exposure.

oaktowner• 11 years ago

But Google doesn't have power over electricity and lease rates or lists of installers -- they're just using publicly available data.

There are other sources for maps data, and many people have 3d modeling software.

So I'm not sure how this is "so much power" concentrated in one organization.

andyl4• 11 years ago

To me, what makes it powerful is the ubiquity - the 'full take' ness of it all. Sure the app is solar-related data, just for a few regions. But could include whatever data Google chooses, expanded to the whole world, for whatever audience Google chooses.

I've worked with aerial surveillance systems, the types used on police choppers. Put the crosshairs of the flir camera on a house and it will tell you all kinds of stuff: age/race of occupants, arrest records, warrants, tax status, etc. Amazing for LE, but a bit big-brotherly for my taste.

In the wrong hands, in the wrong circumstances, data fusion has incredible potential for abuse. IMHO. :-)

wmeredith• 11 years ago

I had a similar thought. I'd bet an "enter your address and Google will tell you your household political orientation" could probably be pretty accurate.

thom_nic• 11 years ago

I've seen a similar project where it lets you navigate to an address in google maps, shows the satellite image, then lets you draw an outline of your roof. (I can't remember if you had to estimate the roof angle or not.)

I wonder if this is this "not available" in many areas because Google is using machine vision to automatically compute roof metrics, or if it's because they don't have rebate & utility info for many markets.

ljk• 11 years ago

This seems pretty cool, so any downsides I'm not seeing?

willyk• 11 years ago

Agreed, this made my day. IMO only downside is that we don't have more of this sort of innovation happening at a smaller scale (akin to PG's recent tweet about the maturity of self driving cars relative to early versions of Google.

melling2• 11 years ago

Want to see what it does, try City Hall:

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof#a=2600%20Fresno%20St%2C%2...

joesmo2• 11 years ago

So City Hall would actually save less money (12k vs 13k/14k) than the two regular homes I tried in San Francisco. If the numbers are correct, we're looking at $650-700 a year in savings. Not bad, but not that great either, especially considering heating alone in both buildings I looked at ran $150-300 / month (including summer which is hardly warmer at night in SF). Can solar panels be installed at such a price on a regular home? I doubt there's any incentive for City Hall here.

EDIT: I also doubt the calculations are correct considering that city hall's roof is many times larger than the two homes I looked at, yet saves less money.

magicalist2• 11 years ago

It looks like it's only tuned for residences (and maybe small apartment buildings) as you can only set the max electricity bill at $500 per month. I'm sure the city hall's bill is much higher.

netfire• 11 years ago

I'm guessing you left the average monthly electric bill slider at the $125/month position. You'd have to adjust the to what it actually is for City Hall, which I'd think is a lot more than $125/month.

anorwell• 11 years ago

One of the tunable parameters is the "size of your electric bill", which defaults to $150/month and maxes at $500/month -- far too low for a city hall, I should think. This is the limiting factor here, not the size of the roof. At $500/month, the recommended installation size is 765 square feet, but the total roof size is 50,171 sq feet. Only a small fraction of the roof area is being used.

This has clearly been designed for residences and not larger buildings.

davidw• 11 years ago

Interesting:

"1,960 hours of usable sunlight per year"

I wonder how they arrive at that number, and how accurate it is? Anyone in SF want to try a few addresses in Outer Sunset vs the Mission?

I'd be interested in seeing that number alone mapped out over the US on a zoomable map.

Shebanator• 11 years ago

FWIW, at least in my case, the numbers here seem optimistic. I had SolarCity come out and do a proposal for my house in San Jose about four years ago. Because my single story house is surrounded by big trees and two story houses, they said I only had a small area where they could install panels with sufficient efficiency, for a 3kW system. Sunspot says I could install an 8kW system covering 1475 sq ft, compared to about 800 sq ft for the Solar City system.

jonknee• 11 years ago

This could be the source of an interesting direct marking mail campaign by an enterprising solar installer. In the mailer you can list actual numbers.

djb_hackernews• 11 years ago

I was recently thinking about a project to show how easy it would be to power the entire US on solar panels. It actually wouldn't require much land, in fact if you put panels on every building top and parking lot you'd be almost there. What I was imagining was something that'd show you "ideal" spots for solar farms. Ideal meaning proximity to population centers, orientation of land, environmental impact, etc.

thrownaway24249• 11 years ago

If you just paved over Edwards AFB with PV panels you'd have 50% of US electric energy demand, and that's assuming a relatively modest 6kWh per day per square meter.

dreamcompiler6• 11 years ago

Generating enough PV power for US electricity needs is easy. Covering a few square miles in Arizona with PV would do the trick. But storing and transmitting that electricity is damn difficult.

minthd2• 11 years ago

So how big of a business this could be for Google ?

sologoub• 11 years ago

Solar lead gen (and this is a very fancy form of lead gen) is a reasonable size business within greater lead gen industry, but I doubt this will be noted for the revenue potential in any of Alphabet earnings calls.

d215• 11 years ago

http://www.zonatlas.nl

granted it is in dutch and made by a completely boring governmental institution. OTH it's made with openstreetmap.

oever• 11 years ago

It's not a governmental institution but an NGO which unites many local governments and other participants.

  http://www.zonatlas.nl/home/over-de-zonatlas/

They use high resolution 3d surface information (elevation data) and weather reports to assess the efficiency of solar panels. The map for my house accurately shows how much efficiency can be expected on each part of the house. This takes into account neighboring buildings and trees. The site also calculates a number of scenarios and allows you to easily request offers and show how long it takes to earn back your investment. They cleverly compare this to interest rate. E.g. on my house, investing in solar now would yield 4.5% interest over 20 years (given certain assumptions).

It is a very impressive site.

Someone• 11 years ago

And http://www.zonnekaart.nl, which links to similar initiatives, such as zonnekaart.nl (gives detailed information about what parts of roofs are useful) and http://www.zonnig.haaglanden.nl (cool color scheme)

pilom• 11 years ago

Other than the "buy now" aspect, this doesn't seem any better for calculating solar savings than http://pvwatts.nrel.gov/ I used PVwatts when sizing my home system in Denver and thought it did a great job.

Navarr3• 11 years ago

It's "easier." I just logged into PvWatts, knowing practically nothing about solar, and I'm confused at Step 2. There's a billion variables that it wants me to fill out instead of trying to calculate them for me for optimal results.

gregable• 11 years ago

Agreed PVWatts is more accurate, and it's what a solar installer is actually likely to use when doing a roof assessment. But to use PVWatts you need to input things like the tilt and orientation of your roof, the size of the system you want to build, the cost of power from your provider, inverter efficiency, etc. This asks for your address and your monthly electricity bill to give you a rough estimate, both of which homeowners are much more likely to know.

thrownaway24249• 11 years ago

Hrmm, I don't know, the Google one seems more accurate in the details. It correctly shows my house as being plunged in darkness pretty much all day long (it's near the bottom of a slot canyon) whereas the site you linked above gives some quite rosy and unrealistic projections.

larrys• 11 years ago

They use 20 years and in the past I have heard that the average time for home ownership is typically 7 years. I don't know the true figure today (wasn't able to find it when I just searched) but for most people a 20 year payback is way to long and I would imagine this certainly contributed to lack of adoption of solar in addition to other factors obviously.

Edit: Note this: https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/faq/#financial-considerat...

rconti2• 11 years ago

It will raise your property value though.

meentsbk• 11 years ago

Seems also very similar to http://www.mapdwell.com/en

rwc• 11 years ago

Shouldn't this be the "S" or "P" in Alphabet? Why is this a Google project?

ChuckMcM3• 11 years ago

Because its "Google Maps advertising", the project is to help Google Maps make a bit more money by selling solar installs via their tool. The "G" company is all about the advertising :-)

birken5• 11 years ago

I live in San Francisco and just had a solar system installed last week, so I have a few comments about this.

1) It vastly overestimated how big a solar system that could fit on my roof (by about 5x). It didn't care about chimneys or skylights (which are easily visible through Google maps), nor SF fire code which states that you need a 3-foot empty pathway on both sides of the crest of your roof [1]. So for almost every roof with a single ridge, this will cut out a large percentage of the best solar real estate.

2) It didn't include local SF providers in the marketplace which are generally higher rated than national providers and can offer additional SF incentives and cost-savings.

So while the estimation of sunlight potential is really cool, the 3d modeling aspect and size of the marketplace leave a little bit to be desired. This site would probably be good at quickly seeing if your roof has any solar potential at all, but if it does, I'd recommend checking Yelp and having a highly-rated solar company come give you a detailed estimate (which would be free).

1: http://www.sf-fire.org/index.aspx?page=1232

TTPrograms• 11 years ago

Is the cost primarily proportional to the size, or do inverters present a major fixed cost?

For the former it doesn't really matter how much you can cover, as it's simply an investment with a certain rate of return that has the amount you can invest limited by roof area.

birken5• 11 years ago

I think all of the hardware will be very proportional to the size. In my case I had micro-inverters on each panel, so it was directly proportional, but this was actually more expensive than having a single large inverter (though more performant).

However, the marginal cost of things like engineering, installation and inspection will certainly go down with the size of the system. How much of that passes to the consumer I don't know, but some of it certainly does. You can imagine the cost of putting 1 solar panel on your roof is not going to be 10x less than putting 10 of them up there.

It is hard to get exact numbers from solar sites as they are very sales-oriented, but it seems like the hardware cost is estimated at anywhere from 20-50% of the total cost of the solar system. The rest of it is engineering, installation, inspection, customer acquisition, profit, etc.

mbostleman5• 11 years ago

I always find it a bit dishonest sounding when these things are referred to as producing a "savings". Solar on a residential rooftop is not financially sustainable when you consider the cost of capital and require a market ROI. So I assume that lessors in this case are receiving a non-trivial government subsidy. Which means, in the end, that whatever the lessee is "saving" and then some is being paid in additional taxes that wouldn't be there if there were no subsidy. All of which is fine for those that want to pay more for energy that is cleaner. But people should not be given the impression that they're paying less. If they really were we'd all have solar rooftops over night.

kuschku4• 11 years ago

Well, look at the subsidies for the existing energy companies. Nuclear companies get the waste handling for free, if they break regulations, often the government pays the bill...

Coal companies never pay for the damages to the environment their huge quarries do...

Subsidies for solar are just one part of it.

If you take these subsidies that you give the energy companies, and add them as tax to the electricity price, you end up with electricity costs like in Germany – 0.40$ per kWh

tstactplsignore• 11 years ago

This is an argument detached from two realities: (1) that fossil fuels receive enormous subsidies in the US and worldwide, and (2) that there is an enormous impact of CO2 on global climate, health, and ecosystems (not to mention the local environmental and health impacts of coal mining and fracking). When accounting for these costs, it becomes increasingly dishonest to claim that fossil fuels are cheaper than renewables.

URSpider945• 11 years ago

The common definition of "savings" is a reduction of cash outlay for the purchaser. The fact that there are government subsidies (or surcharges) involved is not relevant for that calculation.

The Google site is extremely thorough -- for the case where the consumer is buying the panels, they calculate the time to break even, but also a net present value given a 4% cost of capital. Same thing for the lease cases -- for an example I ran, the lease would cost $96 per month (fixed for the 20-year life of the lease), and offset $115 of a monthly $120 electrical bill at today's rates. So, it would generate cash savings for me from day one. Most solar leases in fact GUARANTEE that you will pay less for electricity after the install. So, "savings" should not be in quotes, it's a real savings for the lessee.

As for your argument that we might all be better off if we didn't have to pay higher taxes for the subsidy -- maybe, but my decision to install solar or not is going to have a negligible impact on my personal tax rate, so I should value any savings against a fixed tax rate that doesn't change as a function of my decision.

drited• 11 years ago

Actually by the standards of rates of change in the energy industry, we are going to all have solar panels powering our homes 'overnight' (see the rapid growth of solar forecast in slide 33 of the doc linked below). In many areas, due to rapid price declines and relatively low prevailing interest rates, solar is cost competitive without subsidy now so the ROI is real. As cumulative solar installations continue to grow, we will continue down the cost curve shown on slide 13 and that will be true for more and more people. Which means that subsidies today can actually lead to long term lower energy costs as prices continue to drop. On that topic, we should all be thanking Germany for being farsighted enough to invest in subsidies to keep the industry going for long enough to get us down to where we are on the cost curve today.

Bloomberg new energy finance talk slide deck: http://about.bnef.com/content/uploads/sites/4/2015/04/BNEF_2...

cheald3• 11 years ago

This was true several years ago, but the cost of solar has come down substantially even without considering tax subsidies, and is continuing to decrease at a healthy rate.

For example, Sunroof estimates that a 5.75kWh system would cost $21,500 before subsidies (about $15k after, but we're ignoring that), and that it will save you (gross) $60,000 over 20 years in utility bill costs. You can either:

a) Invest that capital. At a stable 7%, after 20 years, your balance would be about $86.8k.

b) Purchase a solar system for that $21.5k, and invest the difference on your power bill each month. Assuming a base power bill of $200, and the 2.2% annual rate increase that Sunroof uses, you would invest $2400 the first year, $2452.80 the second year, etc. At the same 7% return, then in 20 years your investment balance would be $122.8k, and your power bills would continue to be $0. Remember, these numbers assume an unsubsidized system.

The gain comes from the fact that after the break-even point (at year 12), you are continuing to invest your power bill equivalent, rather than paying it to the power company, whereas in the non-solar case, the increased power bill will never earn you a return.

The downside is that it (with those numbers) takes 12 years for you to come out ahead, and solar tech is moving so fast that the opportunity cost of committing capital to solar today rather than investing it and then liquidating that investment tomorrow to pay for a cheaper and more efficient system may be substantial, but is arguably specifically unknowable. If you don't offset your full cost, the numbers change a bit, as well (but you can certainly compute what happens at a 50% offset for a smaller upfront capital investment easily enough, as well). There are certainly scenarios in which solar is viable unsubsidized today, though.

Feel free to check my math and assumptions: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JoJxX5t7VmRhV1LDI1UF...

IkmoIkmo6• 11 years ago

Actually in many places solar is currently cheaper than the utility, without having to be a cheaper generation source.

For example a cost of 15c per kwh cost from solar is pretty trivial in many parts of the world nowadays. But here's the thing, for example in the Netherlands, I pay 7c per kwh for electricity, and then about 13c in energy specific tariffs, and then VAT on the whole lot. My final electricity price is about 3x (22c) the cost of the electricity itself. But for every kwh I generate myself and don't buy, I save 22c.

In other words, at a hypothetical cost of 15c per kwh, twice as much as electricity from my utility, I save almost half of my bill.

That situation differs radically between countries and even states, but again, savings on solar are a very typical story nowadays. I'd say most solar buyers today are saving money. 5-6 years ago that was different, when most people who bought were still buying with a moral position in mind and paid a slight premium.

Mostly, I don't think people realise how incredibly subsidised solar is. Per unit of energy generated, direct taxes/subsidies are much, much higher than oil. The other part of that story is that we have path dependency in oil and that the carter doctrine has cost trillions of dollars, and that externalities aren't priced in much for fossil. (e.g. cost of pollution, droughts etc).

For example, here's an interesting thought. For every $1m you buy in solar, you get about half a MW in capacity, which generates a little under 1 GWH per year (rounding it up very heavily here but you'll see it's mostly irrelevant). Now here's what that means. First of all, you can get a 30% tax credit, which you can sell. That's $300k recuperated. Then on a portion of the cost, 85% iirc, you can depreciate within 5 years or so. At a tax rate of 35%, that's a total of $300k in tax avoidance due to depreciation. So right off the bat in tax structuring, you've already gotten more than 50% off. Then, your almost 1 GWH per year generates solar credits, which you can sell, too, for about $100k per year. And yes you can presell these for 10 years into the future.

And then and only then, after you've paid $1m, received $600k in tax back from the government and sold solar credits for just the first 10 years for $1m (on a system with 20-40 years of lifetime at least), when you already made $600k accounting profit without generating a single electron, then you can start to actually sell the energy to an offtaker (like an Amazon warehouse) for about 10c per kwh, making you a little under $100k a year.

So you invest $1m, you get $1m, you get $600k in tax benefits and annual income of a little under $100k. Sounds insane? Well it sort of is. It depends on the state, some states are crap (low cost of electricity, low price of solar credit market, little offtaker demand, few solar resources (sun), difficult regulations etc etc), some are great.

And beyond that, solar is simply becoming cheaper really fast. For example, SolarFirst just signed a contract for a 100 MW solar project at a kwh price of 3.8c. Pretty insane.

Anyway in short the notion that solar savings are disingenuous is completely false. In fact virtually all of the big solar companies offer leases right now, where you pay nothing upfront, you don't own the panels, but you lease them on your roof and pay an electricity bill that's lower in the vast majority of cases than your utility. That's their main selling point.

dhess• 11 years ago

Which installer did you choose, and would you recommend them?

birken5• 11 years ago

I used Luminalt [1] and they did a great job throughout the whole process. The installation job was at the highest degree of quality and professionalism that I've experienced.

Though it hasn't been inspected or turned on yet (happens later this week), so I'll see how close their projections were to reality over the coming months as the juice is generated. I did my own projections independently and found that their projections seemed to be on the conservative side, so I'm optimistic.

1: http://www.yelp.com/biz/luminalt-solar-energy-solutions-san-...

pdx6• 11 years ago

Their vendors also don't include the roofing type. For example, I have a flat tar roof and many vendors, such as Sungevity, won't install on it. Local vendors will, but are not on the list, and require I install a new roof first. There goes the $24k in savings for buying outright!

cheald3• 11 years ago

Would that be a sunk cost, or would a new roof increase the value of your home?

newman3142• 11 years ago

Did you choose to lease, loan or buy? Would be interested in knowing the factors driving your decision.

justplay• 11 years ago

404 when accessed with Indian IP

krisgenre• 11 years ago

Same even with a Canadian IP.

josu• 11 years ago

Also Mexico

pella• 11 years ago

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/about/

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/faq/

devy• 11 years ago

same 404 when posting to facebook (where its spiders automatically extracts a title, blobs and images) where their server IPs are probably not all U.S. based. Weird.

0xffffabcd• 11 years ago

Works fine here with a French IP address.

wut42• 11 years ago

404 here, French IP address. (Free) :(

klunger• 11 years ago

404 from Norway

kuschku4• 11 years ago

same with German IP

jvm• 11 years ago

Forgive my ignorance, what does one do during non-insolated hours? Do solar cells typically come with battery packs or does one just pull from the grid?

If the latter then the cost savings are a bit less impressive than stated.

Also can you put power back into the grid in San Francisco? Is that benefit included in the cost savings estimate?

qooleot2• 11 years ago

Often, the most economical answer is heating a water heater rather than storing via a battery.

thrownaway24249• 11 years ago

Solar power systems don't necessarily come with batteries but a decent installation company should be able to propose and implement an integrated system. The Tesla battery pack is an example of some recent innovation in that area.

You can sell power into the grid but PG&E only has to pay you wholesale rates, 3-4 cents per kwh, not what they are charging you to take the same amount of energy out, which is 34 cents per kwh at the top tier. It's basically a scam. You don't want to overbuild on the assumption that selling the surplus would be profitable.

jsprogrammer2• 11 years ago

Is there no real solar power market then? If your local utility is a monopoly then you basically have to accept whatever the utility wants to pay you (even far below 'market' rate). You have no power to negotiate, only capitulate or try to get the local regulator to enforce fair trade.

bostonpete• 11 years ago

It's basically a scam.

Why is it a scam that PG&E won't pay you more for power than they can buy it wholesale?

JoblessWonder• 11 years ago

I'm fairly certain San Francisco lets you "run the meter backwards" and put power back into the grid. That is how they are calculating 100% solar power since the amount you are sending in during the day offesets the amount you are pulling in during the evening. This also means that you don't need to worry about battery packs.

birken5• 11 years ago

If you are already connected to the grid, then you can simply just feed the electricity back into the grid when over-producing (which is tracked by your meter), and then use electricity from the grid at night.

This actually works in your benefit if you have solar panels, because electricity prices are higher during the middle of the day (more demand). So you can "sell" daytime electricity (at high prices) [1], and then buy electricity at night which is much cheaper. This actually is the main benefit of the battery if you are connected to the grid, you can do the same thing.

1: You don't want to sell past your own consumption though otherwise you get paid very little for it

bmelton• 11 years ago

Except that, as pointed out above, the utilities only pay the wholesale rate for the electricity they buy back from you, and sell the overage to your neighbors for full price. Meanwhile, you're likely losing money selling your peak day electricity for 5 cents and buying it back for 15.

timcederman2• 11 years ago

Very few installations use batteries.

Right now in the Bay Area, almost everyone is using net energy metering (NEM). You get a bill once per year, and they balance out your usage vs generation, and any extra usage is charged.

There is a minimum you have to pay each year, so most installers aim for 85-95% of your usage to be generated by your system. As other folks have stated, it's not advantageous to sell back to the grid given the low price - as such, very very few people actually sell back to the grid, and instead make a small purchase each year, and mostly at off-peak rates.

uptown3• 11 years ago

Are firefighters any less likely to enter a house fire where the roof is covered in heavy solar panels? I've heard stories, but never dug into whether it was anti-solar FUD.

VLM2• 11 years ago

It smells of the anti-hybrid astroturfing from a decade or so ago where numerous Ford and GM employees would be glad to tell you on social media that if you get into a car accident in a hybrid, emergency services will leave you to bleed out and die because its a hybrid so you should have bought a SUV or truck like a RealAmerican(tm).

My father in law did the volunteer fire dept thing in his rural area and its very depressing how quickly a typical house becomes unsaveable in a fire. So it is true that most houses with solar panels, in a fire, will end up a total loss, but that's true of most houses ... period, nothing to do with solar panels.

My advice from the frozen north is solar panels are extremely light weight compared to slush/snow covered shingle roofs, which don't seem to slow down firemen very much. The total mass of a couple inches of rain soaked slush snow is unbelievable, many thousands of distributed pounds on a typical roof.

uptown3• 11 years ago

Seems like it's likely mostly anti-solar propaganda, but I guess there is some concern regarding the electrified nature of solar panels rather than their weight.

http://solarenergy.net/News/tackling-risks-solar-panels-pose...

I care little about the house in a fire. I do care about its occupants, and also the safety of the firefighters attempting to extract anyone still inside.

dreamcompiler6• 11 years ago

Everything above is correct. (I'm a volunteer firefighter.) Firefighters nowadays are trained to deal with the high-voltage DC that's present in hybrid and electric cars. It may take a little longer to extricate a victim, but it won't stop us. As for houses, we won't bother entering a burning residence at all unless we're likely to find a person still alive, or the nature of the fire is such that the danger to us -- with our PPE and training -- is minimal.

dreamcompiler6• 11 years ago

Three layers of asphalt shingles (which many houses have) is a lot heavier than solar panels. Firefighters assume residential roofs to be generally pretty crappy in a fire. Their decision to enter will be based more on the extent of the fire and whether they believe anybody's in the house who can be saved.

JshWright3• 11 years ago

No. The weight of the panels and the strength of the roof are accounted for when the system is designed.

Modern lightweight truss construction fails so quickly under a fire load, we're unlikely to make an aggressive attack if the fire has been burning in the attic space for any length of time, panels or no.

fakename• 11 years ago

My pg&e bills have never surpassed $50/month, so project sunroof convinced me that solar is not a good investment!

danielcljc• 11 years ago

A similar site with more geographical coverage, but less computer vision.

http://www.canisolar.com/

dicroce2• 11 years ago

I live in Fresno, AKA, the surface of the sun. It says my yearly savings on a leased system is $2300! Wow. I may be installing solar soon!

minthd2• 11 years ago

What's the difference for you , between leasing and buying ?

drelihan• 11 years ago

Entered my info. Got a call within five minutes and was then asked the exact same info. Company said I don't use enough electricity to make it worth it. Wonder how much they had to pay Google for that lead

thuruv3• 11 years ago

Link dead. . Google error. .

bliti• 11 years ago

I'm also getting an error. Strange to see a google page down...

thuruv3• 11 years ago

Not so. . Most of the old projects & not popular projects pages will be turned to an Error Page. .! But the comments here getting interesting. .!!

thuruv3• 11 years ago

See justplay's answer.

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/about/

MRSallee• 11 years ago

Can anyone with more knowledge of solar technology speak to this?

I know nothing about solar technology developments. I am interested in adding solar to my house some day, but concerned about spending a lot of money today for solar panels that will either (a) be much cheaper in 5-10 years, or (b) be replaced by much more effective panels in 5-10 years.

Assuming that the economics of it are the only motivation for going solar, and that with current technology and pricing the panels pay for themselves only after ~10 years, am I better off waiting a few years to get more efficient/cheaper panels, or is it unlikely we'll make significant advancements in these areas, and/or do current government incentives (which may be ephemeral) make up for the advantages of future tech?

randyrand• 11 years ago

And advancements in fusion, fission, wind, etc that could make today's solar less worthwhile.

No one can predict how much the landscape can change in that time and I wonder if Googles 20-year savings model tries to account for predicted advancements -- and also importantly if their "savings" accounts for the time value of money -- the amount that could be had just by investing generally instead of investing in your own solar. Time to investigate....

Edit: Google "Assumes 2.2% annual increase in electricity prices." That's interesting. We should be talking present value terms so inflation is irrelevant. Are they assuming no tech advancements in the next 20 years? What would be driving up those costs other than inflation?

URSpider945• 11 years ago

My take: Further increases in efficiency could mean that you could install more capacity on your roof, or the same capacity in fewer panels. Assuming that you can fit enough panels to cover 95% of your demand on your roof, installing more panels doesn't make sense (over-generation is not really profitable today). At the same time, a lot of the installation costs are independent of number of panels (permitting, estimates, wiring to the junction box), so installing fewer panels won't bring the cost down tremendously.

At the same time, tax subsidies are scheduled to start phasing out, and utilities are making noises about discontinuing some of the more favorable rate plans that allow 100% net metering (generated power is credited at the full retail rate, not at the wholesale rate). Either of those changes would negatively impact ROI.

It's hard to know what will happen in the future, but with the current environment, many people can lock in a favorable 20-year ROI for a system today.

timcederman2• 11 years ago

That's what subsidies are for - to incent you now, and when panels are cheaper and more efficient later, the subsidies go away.

toephu22• 11 years ago

If you do go for solar just make sure you install it before December 31, 2016 as that's when the 30% Federal tax credit expires (note: this is if you buy, not lease the panels. Leasing does not earn you the 30% credit).

stannius• 11 years ago

The 30% federal tax credit does apply to leased systems. It's just that the leasing company gets the credit "on your behalf" (also known as keeping it for themselves) but includes it in the calculation of how much to charge you as the lease payment.

newman3142• 11 years ago

My personal take is to minimize the amount of temperature variance over time so I'd invest time and money in insulation, weather stripping, other upgrades first as well as reducing my electrical usage in general.

Right now, I'm at a point where I need to use a FLIR to investigate more improvements after which will I then think about solar but it's nice to read up on solar improvements.

IkmoIkmo6• 11 years ago

I'd go for it. Prices will get cheaper (virtually guaranteed), but incentives will also go away (guaranteed, deadlines are already set).

If you only care about the financial decision, then to be honest... not much beats investing in e.g. a broad S&P 500 tracking index. 7% inflation adjusted annual returns + dividends which you can reinvest to go up to 8-9%. Over a 20 year period that's 5x. I'd tune that down to 4x given there's risks and historical returns have been better than they probably will in the future. But it still means at 4x that your $15k solar installation could also have made $60k in the same period.

And there's no way a $15k installation will generate $60k worth of energy, somewhere between $10k and $20k depending on the cost per watt, solar capacity factor and local energy prices. (California does quite nicely and is on the upper end of this spectrum). About a third you get back from the gov, so in a 20 year period in Cali, investing $15k (subsidies included) you may get $30k-$35k in savings if you go solar.

It's really nice but it doesn't beat the market, and most states have cheaper rates than California which is like 30% above average and much fewer sun hours, and less competition, too. Wouldn't be surprised if installation costs were relatively more competitive in California.

So my point being is: 1) it's a great investment and I'd personally go for it. 2) it's, purely financially, not the absolute best way to spend your money, even if it saves you money. So there's still an element of 'I think solar is important' at play. 3) solar tech will get cheaper, but subsidies will fade out.

cookiecaper• 11 years ago

They really need to get Florida mapped. Florida is a great candidate for solar power, but the state government is pretty clearly in the power utility's pocket and they work to make it very difficult for solar providers out here.

iamcurious• 11 years ago

For those who got 404 from their IPs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BXf_h8tEes

nimitkalra• 11 years ago

Risks to getting solar power (according to Project Sunroof) are something to consider.

As with any investment, there are some risks, though a well-installed system will make most risks extremely rare. Risks include PV systems catching fire, installations leading to roof leaks, theft, obsolescence, and hail damage and/or wind damage to the solar system itself.
Fast-growing trees can shade solar installations, reducing production over time. Utilities can change how much they charge their customers for electricity, changing the savings from solar.

listic• 11 years ago

Why are so many people in the USA live in individual houses rather than condominiums (apartments)? The latter is just so much more economical.

agentdrtran• 11 years ago

Because there's a lot of room in the US.

jseliger• 11 years ago

Because zoning codes mandate it: see The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0...) and The Triumph of the City (http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...) for more.

The short version is this: Property owners now have shocking amounts of control over what their neighbors do with property. Owners, especially of single-family houses, elect officials who restrict development through zoning and similar means. Height limits and parking requirements effectively mandate single, detached housing in most of the U.S.

This only really got started in the 70s (see http://jakeseliger.com/2013/07/03/jane-jacobs-is-everywhere-...), and it didn't get really bad until the 2000s, when the shift back to cities ran into insane urban zoning rules to produce huge affordability crises. By now, most developers who dare to build condos or apartments have to build luxury apartments: http://www.wsj.com/articles/rents-rise-faster-for-midtier-ap... because that's the only way to make the economics work.

In the meantime, much of the population growth has shifted to Sun Belt cities in Texas, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida where development is easier and/or simply sprawls more.

skwirl• 11 years ago

Because it's more pleasant and we have the space and money.

If you want more economical, why not just have everyone live in barracks?

toephu22• 11 years ago

Remember the 30% federal tax credit expires at the end of 2016. Only valid if you buy not lease your panels.

patrickmclaren• 11 years ago

It seems to think my apartment building is a parking lot - there's no heat-map.

DirtyAndy• 11 years ago

Another take on this sort of thing: http://app.dumpark.com/sunlight/

The guys behind this apparently wanted to know the best place to go for a beer at any time of the day. They use the zenith of the sun, the surrounding landscape and the surrounding buildings and have it modeled throughout the year. I think they then realised there may be more useful ways to use this data.

toocute2care• 11 years ago

Anyone have any ideas on the computer vision techniques used here?

Rexxar• 11 years ago

For those with 404 errors, it works if you add "?hl=en" at the end of the URL. https://www.google.com/get/sunroof?hl=en

siddhartpai• 11 years ago

Here is a link that doesn't 404 :

https://www.google.com/get/sunroof/about/

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Holy shit, Google is actually that idiotic/incompetent. 404s depending on its interpretation of my IP "location". From US (well, US IP that Google believes is in Hungary, because Google sucks as localization) it works, from other countries it doesn't.

Amazing.

Project Sunroof

Related Stories