80% of American rooftops are suitable for solar panels

Installing solar panels on their roofs is already an option for many people. If you're still undecided about whether it's worth it, Google's new Sunroof program can help you make the right choice.

The Sunroof project was started in August 2015 by engineer Carl Elkin as one of many Google's "20% time projects." The 20% Time Project is a type of research program at Google that requires employees to spend 20% of their work time researching something that interests them. Among them, Gamil, Google News and a series of services were born in this project.

The goal of the project is to measure and evaluate the use of rooftop photovoltaics worldwide. Boston, San Francisco and Fresno were selected as pilot cities for a small scale trial, and then rolled out to all 50 states, and the next stage is to expand to the world. Now, the Sunroof Project has built a three-dimensional model of the roofs of houses across the United States, in addition to identifying the types of trees and growth around the house, analyzing the local weather and climate to estimate how much solar energy each house or building produces from solar panels.

If the system detects that the building has sufficient annual sunlight, then the building is technically suitable for generating electricity with solar panels. As the article's title suggests, the results are surprising - about 80 percent of buildings are suitable for solar panels.

The Sunroof project has also calculated the potential use of solar energy in each state. Among them, Houston has the greatest potential for solar power generation, with a one-year time limit of about 18,940 gigawatt hours of reserves waiting to be developed. That's a huge number, since every 1,000 megawatt-hours of electricity is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 90 homes.

In general, using the Sunroof program not only allows you to find your house on a map, it also provides advice on solar power modules. For example, what size and number of solar cells should be used on the roof, or to assess how much energy the sun can produce and whether it is worthwhile to use solar modules.

Therefore, this is a very useful tool, but also at the right time to catch up with the trend of solar energy into the home. Despite the massive elimination of many solar companies large and small, the U.S. solar market continues to grow, with installations nearly doubling in 2016 compared to the previous year. However, the majority of solar panels installed were of large size, and the number of installations at the residential facility level grew only 19 percent. This is also because the solar market in some large states, such as California, is already close to saturation.

The media is still confident that the U.S. solar market will continue to grow. The Los Angeles Times quoted several industry officials as saying they were optimistic about the growth of the domestic market. The Solar Energy Industries Association sees the residential component market leveling off, especially in the top five states, which account for 70 percent of total installations. According to the latest report from the Solar Energy Industries Association, the growth of emerging solar markets in Texas, Utah and Southern California is not enough to drive the rapid growth of the overall market.

However, the "sunshine roof program" may not have a big impact on such a trend, especially now that some policies such as Net Metering [2], which encourage rooftop photovoltaic systems, are about to fail. According to the Solar Energy Industries Association report, one reason for the slow growth of the solar market is the lack of ability of solar power plant manufacturers to develop new customers, and the "sunshine roof program" may help manufacturers open new markets in this regard.

NetMetering: Net metering is a power policy, which enables consumers with renewable energy generation facilities to deduct part of their electricity bill according to the amount of electricity transported to the grid, that is, only calculate "net consumption", which is undoubtedly an incentive policy for family-level solar power generation systems.