New solar maps help homeowners and installers
Nov 3 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Matt Nauman San Jose Mercury
News, Calif.
Innovations in online mapping are contributing to the rapid growth of solar
energy. The high-tech tools benefit everyone from homeowners and solar-panel
installers to the developers and financiers of large-scale power projects,
industry experts said at a recent solar conference here.
Google Earth allows aerial views of rooftops that help installers prequalify
solar-system buyers. Using Google Maps, San Francisco offers residents and
businesses a chance to see the city's solar hot spots. And a new map from
3Tier, a Seattle company, provides a detailed study of how much sun shines
at any spot in the Western Hemisphere.
"It's fantastic," said Lyndon Rive, chief executive officer of SolarCity,
the state's largest solar-panel installer based in Foster City. "It makes
our business a lot more efficient."
And with the credit crunch and the perilous economy, precise solar maps will
be increasingly important as investors seek assurance that deals will be
profitable, said Kenneth Westrick, founder and CEO of 3Tier, a Seattle
company that just released a solar-irradiation map with information as broad
as a continent and as specific as the house down the street.
Here's a look at some new or emerging solar-mapping technologies and
applications:
It's a solar world
Released last month, 3Tier's solar map of the Western Hemisphere provides a
detailed view of where, when and how intensely the sun shines in North and
South America.
"This is really the tip of the iceberg," Westrick said. "The map is the
paint on house. It's what you really see, but what's behind that is a very
rich data stack."
That's perhaps an understatement. 3Tier had to buy a supercomputer, he said,
to process 11 years of solar data captured every half hour at
three-kilometer resolution from satellite images. Company spokesman Todd
Stone called that type of detail "a technological breakthrough."
While not intended as a consumer product, 3Tier's map does allow a user to
see how much sunshine his or her home gets. The product's real audience is
developers of large-scale solar installations and the entities that finance
those projects as they need the exhaustive day-by-day,
half-hour-by-half-hour solar data to verify the best locations for their
facilities.
Better information means quicker decisions, Westrick said, saving money and
bringing renewable-energy resources into production more quickly.
"What used to take six months or a year to evaluate, now maybe you can do it
in six weeks or six days," he said. "That's really going to move this
process forward."
3Tier's map is available online at firstlook.3tiergroup.com/solar. (Access
is free, but registration is required.) The company sells customized
versions to project developers for $4,000 to $7,000, and makes the bulk of
its revenue selling energy-generation forecasts based on its solar and wind
maps, Westrick said.
Finding the right location is crucial, he said, because a move of just a few
kilometers can mean more or less sunshine. "Over a period of years, there's
going to be a huge difference in how much power is going to be produced."
The company plans to create solar maps of the rest of the Earth in the next
year or so.
Installer's best friend
With the help of Google Earth, an installation company can quickly tell you
if your home is in an appropriate location for a solar system and how big a
system your roof can handle.
Borrego Solar, based in San Diego County, will do more than 200 solar
installations this year, including homes, businesses and schools. A
165-employee company, Borrego has six locations, including San Jose, San
Francisco and Berkeley, said Aaron Hall, its CEO and chairman.
Using Google Earth maps allows his staff to do much even before a homeowner
signs up for a system, and before the first visit to the home takes place.
"We can look at your property and right away tell you, 'Oh, you have 15
trees around your house,' " Hall said. "You can get a lot of quick
information that's not just Web-site generic information."
Further advances are coming soon, he said. Currently, Borrego and many other
installers rely on hand measurements of roof dimensions. When they're off,
even slightly, it means re-engineering a system on the fly and having to
tell a homeowner that the system will look slightly different than what had
been anticipated.
Rive said SolarCity already uses Google Earth to measure roofs. That, and an
analysis of a customer's electric bill, allows his company to provide a "99
percent accurate" estimate of how much energy a solar system can produce, he
said. Touring a solar city
San Francisco's solar map provides a virtual look at the sunny side of that
city. Created by CH2M Hill for the city and county of San Francisco as part
of the Department of Energy's $5 million Solar America Cities program, it
provides frequently updated information and an interactive experience.
"In San Francisco, we get a lot of people who say, 'San Francisco is too
foggy. Does solar even make sense for us?' We thought, wouldn't it be great
to not only show their solar assessment, but also show them some of their
neighbors who had done solar," said Johanna Partin, renewable energy program
manager for the city's department of the environment.
The map, at sf.solarmap.org., shows many of the city's residential,
commercial and municipal solar installations. It features daily reports from
the city's 27 solar monitoring sites, includes photos and stories from some
of the solar-system owners, and offers updated statistics showing that 871
solar systems are generating 5.9 megawatts of power in San Francisco.
San Jose also is one of 25 Solar America Cities, and will create a solar map
that also includes energy-efficiency efforts in various neighborhoods, said
Mary Tucker, the city's energy program manager in the environmental services
department.
The San Francisco map allows homeowner to determine if their home is
appropriate for solar, how much it might cost, what incentives are available
and even provide links to installers, said Steve Herrmann, client service
director for CH2M Hill, a Denver-based engineering/construction company that
won the Energy Department contract to administer Solar America Cities
activities.
"Today, when you call up (a solar company) to figure out if you have any
solar potential on your roof, they roll out a truck, get out the ladder and
the guy climbs on your roof," he said. "We think this technology improves on
that."
Contact Matt Nauman at (408) 920-5701 or at
mnauman@mercurynews.com.
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