Google Inc, the American technology giant, has an unofficial corporate motto – Don’t be evil. Sounds simple enough but you have the world’s internet search data under your belt, it must be difficult sometimes.
So what do you do when you’re taking a lot of criticism over your stances on net neutrality, copyright, censorship and privacy, to be seen as “not evil”?
Easy! You save the planet – one roof at a time. Well when we say “easy”, it’s easy when you’re worth a little over US$130 billion and employee 55000 of the best minds in the world.
Google has created a pet project to do just that. It’s called Project Sunroof.
Project Sunroof uses Google’s sophisticated mapping systems and combines it with information from other databases to perform an analysis of a properties roof and recommends a solar panel installation to generate close to 100% of the homes electricity usage.
The system computes how much sunlight hits the properties roof in a year by creating a 3D model of the roof and casts shadows from nearby structures from all possible sun positions. The system is so clever that it also uses historical cloud and temperature patterns to see what affect they may have on solar production.
At the moment, Sunroof is only available to a select few areas of previously mapped residential areas in the San Francisco Bay area, Fresno in California, and Boston, Massachusetts.
