Adding solar panels to your roof can be frustrating, since it’s often difficult to know if your home receives enough light to justify the investment. Google Maps, however, has satellite, navigation and sunlight data for every property in the world, so it’s ideally placed to tell you how many rays hit your crib on a daily basis. That’s why the firm is launching Sunroof, a database of how much solar energy hits each building in a city, helping people work out if it’s worth the effort. Sunroof is intended as a “treasure map” for future green energy projects , telling you how much of a saving you’d make and how long it’d take to make back your initial outlay. To begin with, Project Sunroof is only starting in a few places: Boston, San Francisco and Fresno, but if it’s successful, will roll out to the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, in the future. Once you’ve worked out how much you’re likely to generate in energy savings, the Sunroof website will put you in touch with a local installer. We tested the service out on Aol’s building in San Francisco, and it told us that it received 1, 841 hours of usable sunlight per year. The site was also able to tell us that we have roughly 15, 461 square feet of available space that we could use to install solar panels into that space. It then took us through our options, letting us know that we’d save $14, 000 if we leased the hardware from a third party, or $24, 000 if we bought them outright. Comments Source: Google Tags: ClimateChange, Google, Green, Maps, Power, Project, ProjectSunroof, Solar, SolarPanel, Sunroof

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Google’s making it easy for you to get solar panels onto your roof