[HN Gopher] Google Project Sunroof
___________________________________________________________________
Google Project Sunroof
Author : kaycebasques
Score : 90 points
Date : 2023-02-07 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sunroof.withgoogle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sunroof.withgoogle.com)
| mbgerring wrote:
| Arcadia's Arc platform also does this, except it uses actual
| energy and tariff data, and is used by every major solar
| installer in America to produce savings estimates accurate enough
| to write binding contracts against. Check it out:
| https://www.arcadia.com/arc
| technick wrote:
| I hope someone has already written the eulogy for this service.
|
| Their numbers also appear to be off. I compared my property to a
| house that has over 4x the amount of roof space for solar cells
| and their calculations only showed a 67% increase in the money
| recouped after 20 years.
| mlsu wrote:
| Putting solar panels on roofs may have made sense when PV was
| expensive and the component cost was a big multiple.
|
| But now? Far better to just stick a bunch of them in the desert
| where they can be inexpensively installed and maintained -- pass
| the savings along to consumers. This saves a lot of pain when
| people "invest" a bunch of money in labor intensive
| installations, only to figure out the difference between
| wholesale and consumer rates when they cannot sell power back to
| the grid at $.20/kWh.
|
| At a macro scale, there is no reason to incentivize residential
| solar, other than "feels."
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Payback period in most parts of the US is ~10 years for
| residential rooftop solar. The equipment will last at least
| 25-30 years, most likely longer at a lower capacity rating
| (panels degrade ~0.5-1%/year). It also prevents your utility
| from holding you hostage economically, because they'll just
| keep raising rates at the max rate the PUC allows and to max
| their equity return permitted.
|
| I'm unsure why you think savings would be passed to ratepayers
| versus kept as profit by investor owned utilities? Might happen
| with coops and non profit utilities. Utility scale solar
| absolutely helps drive out fossil generation at the macro, but
| residential rooftop solar is a hedge against utility
| monopolistic practices.
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/electricity-prices-inflatio...
|
| https://www.utilitydive.com/news/retail-electricity-prices-c...
|
| https://www.wptv.com/money/consumer/florida-residents-strugg...
| mlsu wrote:
| No reason to prevent people from putting solar on their roofs
| if they wish.
|
| I'm talking about tax rebates and credits given to people who
| put solar on their roofs. I'm sure these are good
| investments: they're subsidized!
| ptaffs wrote:
| I had the local solar reseller estimate for installing on my
| flat roof house. I would like to think I am keen on going
| green, but after three visits, some hard sell and
| spreadsheets showing when and how I would break even, i
| really felt like I was just engaging in a long-term finance
| deal. I would pay the same as I currently do, but to the
| solar finance lender, not to my local electricity company.
| And some of the cost benefit was speculated based on my local
| electricity company buying from me. I also had concerns about
| roof maintenance when it was inaccessible due to the panels.
| I also worried that to sell my house I would have to find a
| buyer willing to take-on the debt, the reseller
| unrealistically insisted the opposite, that this would add
| value. I didn't sign up, having seen companies fold, be
| acquired, change terms and conditions and essentially screw
| consumers, it just wasn't appealing.
| mulletbum wrote:
| This is exactly my experience as well. I got a lot of hard
| sales tactics that all sounded like "Pay us instead of your
| power company." I see no incentive to do that honestly, it
| just leaves a bunch of pain and complicated math for me to
| take care of and they eat up all the savings. From what I
| can tell, just like recycling, it is almost useless unless
| we all group together and do it at once. In this case, it
| is better for my power company to innovate that each
| individual take on the problem themselves.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > it is almost useless unless we all group together and
| do it at once.
|
| There are coops that perform group buys if you don't feel
| sophisticated enough to compare bids and select an
| installer (which is a reasonable position to take):
| https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org/
|
| https://reddit.com/r/solar is also a resource for having
| bids reviewed, asking for system and install advice, etc.
|
| (i collectively own ~100kw of residential solar and
| provide guidance gratis to others constructing or
| purchasing their own systems)
| jeffbee wrote:
| This tool, while cool, is an application of large-scale image
| processing and won't stand scrutiny over the estimates for
| individual buildings. Just as an example, it features
| Oklahoma City, but their model does not seem to include the
| mean time between being destroyed by hail or tornados. This
| would be a somewhat relevant point for OKC.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| If your panels are destroyed, you're going to get the
| replacement cost back from home insurance along with your
| roof repair claim. Unless your panels are destroyed in year
| one, your deductible will more than have been paid for by
| the panels' production.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Rooftop racking strengthens roofs (racking is mounted to
| roof trusses with asphalt roofing, or friction mounts on
| seams are used with standing seam metal roofs), and panels
| are rated to withstand hail (1 inch hail at 50 mph speeds)
| and hurricane force winds. Homeowner's insurance will cover
| replacement of damaged panels and systems in the event of a
| loss. A few minutes with a search engine of your choice
| will confirm these facts.
| jeffbee wrote:
| A little searching would also show that the installed
| capacity in Oklahoma is just 1% of that in Arizona and I
| think there's a reason for that. Even of your insurance
| covers it, it's not like the insurer is operating a
| steady-state loss. You're paying for it, and that factors
| into an economic estimate.
| advisedwang wrote:
| A few reasons PV on roofs might still make sense:
|
| * Cheap land may be far away from consumers, requiring
| expensive and inefficient transmission lines.
|
| * As PV costs come down, land cost become a higher fraction.
| Roofs do not require a land purchase.
|
| * Some locations are politically unwilling or unable to do
| large scale solar. rooftop solar provides a route for personal
| adoption.
|
| Finally remember the two options are not mutually exclusive!
| cogman10 wrote:
| Roofs have the distinct advantage of not requiring new land
| acquisitions and being close to consumption (cutting
| transmission costs).
| wefarrell wrote:
| That doesn't mean that problems that can be solved at the macro
| scale should _only_ be solved at the macro scale. If, for
| whatever reason, the best solutions aren 't being implemented
| that doesn't mean no solution should be implemented.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Easy solution to that, just mine crypto with all your excess
| solar power.
| icedistilled wrote:
| Rooftop space is wasted space, it should be used for something.
| I'm not against solar in the desert, but at the same time
| deserts are actually beautiful and sensitive ecosystems. If
| there's space on roofs that can reduce the impact on
| wilderness, then we should use it.
|
| Branding that as "feels" is dismissive to rational debate as in
| that line of reasoning there is no reason not to sell yosemite
| or joshua tree national park to developers other than "feels"
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Building solar farms in the desert requires expensive grid
| upgrades.
|
| Putting solar panels on your roof generates the electricity
| near where you consume it, which is a big advantage.
|
| Rooftop solar can have payback periods as short as 5-10 years
| depending on the location. It makes a lot of sense for
| individuals to embrace that if they want, while utilities can
| also do their thing in the desert.
| DeRock wrote:
| I used to agree with you, because if you look at the system as
| a whole, centralizing generation is more efficient. But I am
| currently paying 2/3 of my per kWh rate just for distribution.
| PGE (the northern california utility) is some combination of
| negligent, corrupt, and standard fare profit seeking, that I
| simply don't trust them to pass on the efficiency savings to
| me.
| jedberg wrote:
| Until someone figures out superconduction at room temperature,
| there will always be transmission losses, which you don't get
| when you generate and store the power at the point of
| consumption.
| nix23 wrote:
| I wait for a google toilet since years!
| rdl wrote:
| LOL/cry that it doesn't let you enter a current electric bill
| above $500, but does include Puerto Rico and Hawaii adresses.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| To be safe is it better to use a neighbor's address?
| the_arun wrote:
| I entered an address. It said $14K savings for 20 years. It takes
| $15K to install solar roof. So break even is like 20 years -
| which is half the productive life time. It doesn't motivate me to
| install Solar panels.
| rconti wrote:
| Sounds like it worked, then.
| Matthias247 wrote:
| It might be assuming no energy price increases. Given that
| energy e.g. increased in many german cities from 30ct/kWh to >
| 60ct/kWh, it might break even much faster.
|
| On the other hand it might however also not include maintenance
| costs.
| fastest963 wrote:
| You also get 30% back in the form of a tax credit when you
| purchase solar. So that might mean that the cost is only $10k.
| I'm also not sure if the Sunroof website is just doing straight
| math based on today's electricity rates or if it assumes some
| amount of inflation. If the past predicts the future your rates
| could be 75%+ higher in 20 years making solar much more
| lucrative.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I researched historical rates in San Diego (upcoming solar
| install prework) and prices have increased an average of
| 5%/year for 10 years running. This felt like a reasonable
| assumption to me, although to be cautious I used 3%.
|
| Rates will change! Energy doesn't look like it will get
| cheaper, especially with EV fleet rollouts.
|
| Accounting for planned 2 EV purchases at 10k miles/year, the
| largest system I can build on my roof has something like
| $150k savings against <$50k cost over 20 years.
|
| That gives a lot of room for unexpected issues and feels like
| a wise bet to take.
| ec109685 wrote:
| It depends on what your electricity price is. For our house,
| it's way higher than the estimate (and they let you bump up the
| estimate). The cost to put panels on was pretty spot on to the
| quotes I've received.
| maherbeg wrote:
| I don't think the map sources it uses have been updated in a long
| time. We've had a tree removed from the front of our house 2
| years ago that clearly shows up in the map.
| sithadmin wrote:
| >Enter a U.S. or Puerto Rico address
|
| _Enters address in top 50 (population) US county_
|
| "Project Sunroof hasn't reached that address"
|
| ...well, alright then.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Was your house built in the last, what, 7-8 years?
|
| (I'm curious if the data hasn't been refreshed since the site
| launched.)
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| My hunch is that they require LiDAR data for the estimate and
| LiDAR data is currently collected one municipality at a time
| and stored in many different places. It's a data fragmentation
| problem.
|
| In comparison, ground elevation data (omitting buildings and
| trees) can be collected using radar from orbit. That's why we
| have consistent and widely available elevation data like SRTM
| for the entire planet.
| Animats wrote:
| Expect this project to be cancelled. Google is in layoff mode.
| echelon wrote:
| It's more evidence of how bad Google has been at building
| diverse revenue streams.
|
| Search is going to be driven to zero profit, and that's going
| to cripple Google.
|
| Literally everyone is empowered to build better products than
| Google search. And Microsoft / OpenAI will subsidize it,
| laughing all the way to the bottom. It'll completely poison 50%
| of all the money Google can make.
|
| Google had two decades to ensure they were safe, and stuff like
| Killed By Google / Project Sunroof is all they've got to show
| for what their product culture can build.
|
| Google is going to try really hard to reinvent themselves, but
| they haven't accomplished anything along that front in the last
| two decades. I wouldn't bet on that magic happening overnight.
| Their founders have been absent and their leadership has been
| coasting. The picture is clear as day.
|
| Google's done. Google got checkmated hard.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| people just get on here and say nonsense like this.
| echelon wrote:
| Dude, I'm living in my office working on this stuff 24/7. I
| quit my $400k/yr TC job because I believe in this stuff so
| strongly. You have no idea the wave of disruption coming.
| I'm seeing fundamental breakthroughs every single day. AI
| Twitter is simultaneously incredible and haunting.
|
| So many people are sleeping on something bigger than the
| internet itself. This is huge. Pay attention.
|
| Google should be scared to death. They're in a precarious
| position and ripe for disruption. Even adapting to the new
| world order puts their primary revenue stream at risk.
|
| Think about it and then think about how you might be able
| to take advantage of this. Fortunes unlike any before are
| about to be made.
| VectorLock wrote:
| I can't wait to see this "bigger than the internet."
| mden wrote:
| > You have no idea the wave of disruption coming.
|
| Cool, but can you give some concrete examples so it
| doesn't sound like you're being extremely hyperbolic?
|
| > Even adapting to the new world order puts their primary
| revenue stream at risk.
|
| Even if Bing and Google end up having similar LLM chat
| capabilities with Bing being first to deliver, would it
| be enough to get Google users to move to Bing?
|
| The current business models need to be more than being
| able to converse with a chatbot. Ads will still need to
| be integrated and they might come off a lot worse when
| integrated into a conversation. It's definitely
| interesting times but I don't see how it's a new world
| order yet.
| foobazgt wrote:
| How is Google sleeping on AI? By all accounts, they have
| had a better LLM than ChatGPT (Lamda), years in advance
| of ChatGPT.
|
| Google is hampered in that they have a lot to risk.
| They're a big lawsuit target that can't go around wildly
| violating copyright and subjecting the world to
| dangerously, convincingly confident BS.
|
| But make no mistake - they are world leaders in AI, they
| have their best engineers working on it, they beat
| everyone to the punch with a high performing LLM amongst
| a mountain of other AI advances, and they recognize the
| threat to their business model. You're kidding yourself
| if you think otherwise.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| Honest question. Do you think every product reachable from a
| google URL is staffed?
|
| https://www.google.com/moon/ ?
| noman-land wrote:
| I will never trust a Google product again for the rest of my
| life.
| warent wrote:
| I wish this was flamebait hyperbole that I could downvote,
| especially as an ex-employee, yet here I am now avoiding
| Google as much as possible. Transitioning to providers like
| Fastmail and my own home cloud; even switching to Kagi for
| search. Sad times, but probably for the best
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| I don't know why this guy is being downvoted. I thought this
| _already_ was canceled, as (almost?) all 20% time projects at
| Google have been killed. Last time I heard about this being
| relevant was, 2015? ish?
| skybrian wrote:
| If they actually knew it to be cancelled then it would be
| useful to share that. Saying "it might be cancelled" adds no
| value. You don't need to know anything or even need look at
| the web page. Nothing is learned.
| jsnell wrote:
| Because it is a repetitive, low-value comment which gets
| spammed to basically every thread that's even tangential to
| Google.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Sort of? It's still a valid comment as long as it continues
| to be true. Google needs to clean house at the top, and go
| back to engineering-first teams, not engineering-never.
| dontreact wrote:
| It's not true
|
| Source: I work at Google
| jsnell wrote:
| A lot of things can be true, and still not be worth
| posting thousands of times per year on HN.
|
| Because do you see what's happened here? Whatever
| interesting discussion there might have been to be had on
| this project has now been smothered by the top-voted
| comment being just a tired repetition of the same "Google
| kills products, hehe, hehe" echo chamber. (I don't know
| if there really is that much discussion to be had on the
| actual topic of the post, but it should at least get a
| chance!)
| simondotau wrote:
| I tend to prefer an occasional, short, low effort comment
| more than the long-winded, hall monitor style commentary
| on hacker news guidelines which so often follows.
| kyrra wrote:
| This project was launched in 2015.
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-introduces-project-sunroof
| [deleted]
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| This is a cool project, but it hasn't been updated in YEARS. I
| think it was put on lifesupport in 2017.
| https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/googles-project...
| jedc wrote:
| That article is only about the lead-generation part of Project
| Sunroof being shut down. Which makes a ton of sense - it was
| likely not generating much revenue, but managing a program like
| that can suck up a ton of time in managing those relationships.
| It's just easier to kill it and let everyone compete in search
| results instead.
|
| You're correct in that the design hasn't been updated in years,
| but... so? From poking around in my city, everything still
| seems to work the same. (Though I wonder if the estimates are
| now out of date...)
| coder543 wrote:
| > You're correct in that the design hasn't been updated in
| years, but... so?
|
| I checked a house that was built about 4 years ago in a major
| metro area, and Project Sunroof just showed an empty field
| and "sorry, we haven't reached that address yet".
|
| I'm fairly sure _nothing_ about this site is being updated.
| That also means that any structural changes to houses
| (including additions, remodeling of the roof, or just
| complete bulldoze-and-rebuild) or the surrounding property
| (tree growth, trees being cut down, etc) are not reflected in
| the estimates.
|
| > Though I wonder if the estimates are now out of date
|
| By all appearances, they are. _Massively._ The older this
| data gets, the less useful it becomes. It 's not really a "so
| what?" situation if the data isn't being kept up to date.
| jghn wrote:
| Damn, thanks for pointing this out. There's a new construction
| near me that could have a big impact on solar viability of my
| roof. I figured I'd wait until Sunroof updated to reflect that
| before considering doing my roof. Guess that's not going to
| play out the way I hoped.
| jahewson wrote:
| Less of a moonshot and more of a sunshot.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Cool site, but its been around for years.. not seeing anything
| new on it today?
| kaycebasques wrote:
| I submitted the post. I am a Googler but am not aware of any
| news about this project. Just thought it was cool and would
| share it in case it's useful for anyone.
|
| And correct, it has been around for years (2016 to be exact):
| https://sustainability.google/progress/projects/project-sunr...
| coder543 wrote:
| Unfortunately, the data has not been updated in years either.
|
| If you're a Googler and you find this project interesting,
| maybe you can find the right people internally to work with
| to revitalize this project. It's a really cool concept, just
| so far out of date that it isn't very useful any more.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Use https://solcast.com/ has a free version no credit card, also
| had it hooked up to homeassisant via their API.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| They say they account for trees when calculating usable roof area
| but I can't find if they account for building shading in the
| total hours of sunlight.
|
| I've been working on a tangential project [1] for helping people
| find sunny areas anywhere in the world based on topography and
| building data and must say that Google trove of LiDAR data is
| amazing. Does anyone know if it's accessible to developers?
|
| [1]
| https://shademap.app/@47.60502,-122.33437,15z,1675804770099t...
| smm11 wrote:
| A Google thing started then abandoned? Never heard of such a
| thing!
| crispinb wrote:
| This is a local-only service for just a single nation.
| silisili wrote:
| Weird. My address shows a pin on the map, with the house missing.
| Both neighbors are there, and gives valid estimates for them.
| siva7 wrote:
| So that's Googles best bet how to not being killed by Microsofts
| AI adventure
| eclipxe wrote:
| What? How do you even make that connection?
| jedberg wrote:
| Amusingly they don't appear to be using Google Maps for the data,
| or if they are, it's an old dataset. They still have the old
| image of my house before I remodeled, but GMaps has the new roof.
| n00bskoolbus wrote:
| Had this in my city for a time. Was a partnership between some
| tech company and the big local energy provider. Got axed after
| two years and seems like the tech company didn't have any rights
| to the data since it's no longer accessible. Cool idea but miss
| my local data :(
|
| Found the company, they still partner with a small amount of
| cities: https://myheat.ca/
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-07 23:00 UTC)