How solar companies are partnering with Google to make installations faster and more affordable
Featured technology
Google Maps Platform
Solar API
Geospatial data
Who we’re helping
Partners
Solar installers
Cities
Homeowners
Our role
The Solar API allows companies to build solutions that easily educate and engage potential clients with high quality, visual insights about a rooftop’s solar potential. This allows customers to have personalized information within seconds, increasing conversions due to less effort and lower costs.
New research shows that Google’s Solar API enables companies to scale their businesses, facilitate job growth, and increase their customer base while helping them reduce more than 6 million metric tons of lifetime GHG emissions through installations in 2024.1
Overview
For over a decade, Google has created tools to help more people adopt solar energy; from Sunroof—a free online resource for homeowners to quickly assess the benefits of adding solar to their house simply by entering an address—to Solar API, which empowers our partners, such as installers, to plan optimal solar setups for homeowners, provide price quotes, and create permit-ready designs. Google developed these tools and made our high-quality solar data available specifically for our partners to grow their businesses.
Our solar partnerships form an ecosystem that leverages Google’s unique data, AI, and Google Maps Platform to facilitate solar adoption. Using highly-accurate aerial and satellite images, 3D rooftop models and elevations, shading data (from trees and structures), annual sun positions, historical weather patterns, and local electricity rates—all accessible remotely, eliminating costly site visits—we empower various groups:
- Individuals: Project Sunroof helps homeowners assess their solar potential and savings
- Cities: Environmental Insights Explorer (EIE) supports the development of solar incentive programs
- Real estate professionals: Google Earth assists in designing solar-ready developments
- Installers: Solar API helps to estimate the solar potential of a building and the generation of installation-ready proposals through detailed modeling that creates an optimal solar array for customers
Solar API has continued to grow with new partners and in additional regions, and we’re seeing the impact the Solar API is having on the world. Over the past two years, we’ve collaborated with organizations such as The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) to leverage the emerging best practices and principles to estimate how Solar API and other solutions can help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis indicates that, in the US alone, the Solar API supported installations in 2024 that we estimate will help enable partners to reduce more than 6 million metric tons of lifetime GHG emissions.1
The power of partnerships
Our partners leverage the Solar API data in a variety of ways to provide better solutions for their customers, improve their business operations, and ultimately install more solar which leads to more job creation.
For the solar industry, helping consumers understand the value of rooftop solar is the first step on a clean energy journey. To do this, companies like DemandIQ, MyHeat, and Tepco have created compelling solar shopping experiences with the Solar API’s accurate rooftop assessments and imagery, increasing customer conversions from interest to purchase.
Our Solar API also provides rooftop measurements and shading data so installers can create installation-ready solar designs remotely, without ever visiting a site.
With detailed surface models and solar-specific data and shading values for nearly every US building, leading solar software companies use the API to help create 3D models and locate an optimal solar array for their customers. Companies like OpenSolar, Aurora, and Sunrun provide thousands of energy professionals worldwide with a digital design tool that reduces the time, effort, and cost of laying out a solar system and defining installation instructions. Using the Solar API, customers report that conversion rates go up and customer proposal to installation to permit times are shortened.
Increased customer conversion rates mean an increase in installations and therefore jobs. According to OpenSolar, thousands of solar professionals work with their software to design and install solar. And the 14th annual National Solar Jobs Census found that the US solar industry employed 279,447 workers nationwide as of 2023, representing an increase of 5.9% from 2022 with over 15,000 jobs added.
The importance of measurement
To understand the significance of our work with our partners, we wanted to estimate the greenhouse gas emission reductions enabled by Solar API on both an annual basis and a lifetime basis, with annual accounting focusing on emissions reductions occurring within a specific year, and lifetime accounting considering emissions reductions occurring across the entire solution’s lifespan. We utilize and share the findings of both methods below. For both we analyzed publicly available permit data and satellite imagery to see when solar was installed on buildings that used Solar API for planning.
Spotlight on our process
For our estimate, using publicly available solar permit data,2 we counted the number of buildings that, during 2024, used both the Solar API and had a solar permit issued shortly after. We used National Labs data sources3 to approximate the average panel installation size per state, the average amount of energy generated by sunlight on those panels, and the amount of carbon reduced by the energy generated due to those panels over their projected lifespan. Additionally, we matched the solar power generated by a solar panel to the marginal emissions rate on a per state, per-hour-of-the-year basis.
With this process, we estimate that 6 million metric tons of lifetime GHG emissions reductions were enabled by solar panels installed by our partners utilizing the Solar API in 2024 in the US. Using the annual accounting basis, we estimate that in 2024, 0.6 million metric tons of GHG emissions reductions were enabled by solar panels installed by our partners in the US alone.4 The difference is using the lifetime accounting basis, we look at the actions (permits) that occurred in 2024 and estimate the enabled emission reductions resulting from those actions throughout the solar panels’ entire lifetime. For annual, we estimate a single year’s (2024) worth of emissions reductions, enabled by all current and historical actions back to 2022 (past and present solar installations) which are still generating emissions reductions in 2024.
Both estimates are likely conservative5 as we’ve chosen to limit the scope of impact to what can be validated: The permit database takes several months to update and has only partial coverage of the permits issued in the US, and we have not extrapolated to other areas of the US or the world where Solar API is being used by installers for this analysis.
More details on our methodology are in our recently released enabled emissions reduction principles: Google’s philosophy on how we are beginning to estimate the impact of our products through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by leveraging best practices from organizations such as the EGDC’s “Net Carbon Impact Assessment Methodology for ICT Solutions” and the WBCSD’s “Guidance on Avoided Emissions.” We’re sharing the principles, which have been reviewed with several of our external partners, as our hope is others can learn from and help us improve them over time. We will continue to strive to help our partners and work together!
Looking ahead
We expect our impact to meaningfully grow as we continue to improve and expand the Solar API, with advancements to satellite imagery and mapping, as well as adding new features like obstacle and material detection, which can increase design speed and maximize results worldwide.
Our partnerships and coverage areas are also expanding, including a recent experimental launch in the Global South that added data for 125 million new buildings across 23 countries such as Malaysia and India, extending the total potential coverage by 1.9 billion additional buildings. This is a massive step toward global solar accessibility.
To learn more about our measurement principles, read the enabled emissions reduction principles here.
By Grant Goodman, Senior Strategy and Operations Lead
Lusann Yang, Senior Software Engineer
Stuart Sweeney Smith, Product Analyst, Environmental Footprinting
Saleem Van Groenou, Senior Product Manager
Selene Chida, Data Scientist
Jackie Mauro, Data Scientist
Chase Bari, Software Engineer
1 To estimate the lifetime emissions reductions enabled in 2024, Google counted the number of buildings that used the Solar API and had a solar permit issued shortly thereafter (based on publicly available permit data). We then used Berkeley Lab’s Tracking the Sun (open source NREL dataset) to estimate the average installation size per state, NREL PVWatts to provide insolation data, and the NREL Cambium model to estimate the amount of emissions reduced by the energy generated due to those panels over a 25-year estimated lifespan. Enabled emissions-reductions estimates include inherent uncertainty due to factors that include the lack of primary data and precise information about real-world actions and their effects to date, as well as forward-looking projections. Google is relying on its own substantiation of the enabled emissions-reduction impact, in consultation with multiple third-party partners that have reviewed and support the methodology discussed herein. The data and claims have not been verified by an independent third-party. We will continue to work to refine our methodologies and inputs for these estimates.
2 Permit data covers ~300 jurisdictions in the US with an emphasis on major cities.
3 National Lab data sources include: NREL Cambium, NREL PVWatts, and Berkeley Lab’s Tracking the Sun.
4 The data used is the same used in the lifetime accounting basis—see endnote (1). For both annual and lifetime methods, we use a 25-year estimated lifespan. The difference is that the estimated annual enabled emissions reduction takes into account solar installations enabled by Solar API prior to 2024 (dating back to 2022) to calculate the total impact in 2024 alone. It estimates a single year’s worth of emission reductions each year of a solar panel’s 25-year lifespan.
5 Currently, we do not extrapolate from our data; instead, we only look at the intersection of action (API calls) and validated permits, which is why the estimated impact is likely conservative—we don’t want to overstate the potential impact. A significance scale (see enabled emissions reduction principles) is leveraged based on how significant our contribution was in the solution, and in certain cases, we may apply a weighting to the impact estimate. We continue to look for ways to validate installations in the US and across the world.