Increased coverage, accuracy, and value proposition
Improved CPR’s geographical residential rooftop coverage, experiencing up to a 90% increase in rooftop and shading data coverage
Enabled CPR to cover rural areas that were previously underserved
Significantly enhanced CPR’s residential rooftop solar accuracy and value proposition to utility customers
The Solar API enables Clean Power Research to improve residential solar calculations and cover over 90% of homes in the US and Canada, significantly enhancing its value proposition to utility agencies.
The Solar API enables Clean Power Research to improve residential solar calculations and cover over 90% of homes in the US and Canada, significantly enhancing its value proposition to utility agencies.
Accelerating the clean energy transition
Clean Power Research (CPR) is a mission-driven software company accelerating the clean energy transition. For over 25 years, they've partnered with the solar industry, utilities and energy agencies, providing the data-driven insights and software solutions needed to navigate a rapidly evolving energy landscape.
Driven by a deep commitment and a passion for using data to drive positive change, with their suite of software products including PowerClerk®, for workflow automation, WattPlan®, focused on customer engagement and education, and SolarAnywhere® which provides global historical, real-time, and forecast irradiance data for solar development and operations.
WattPlan and the Google Maps Platform Solar API
With the increase of energy choices available to homeowners, electric utilities find themselves needing to educate their consumers about their programs and offerings–including the transition to renewable energy. WattPlan was created by CPR to enable utilities to provide objective digital tools to drive awareness and decision-making through trusted calculations, personalized analyses, and actionable insights.
When it comes to whether or not a home is suitable for solar, several pieces of customer-specific information–current and future usage requirements, available renewable energy programs and incentives, and the roof’s capacity to generate solar energy–are needed in order to provide useful advice, tailored to the homeowner’s needs and intentions.
CPR prides itself on data accuracy, objectivity, and availability, and were looking for a solution that met these requirements for residential rooftop and shading data. After a thorough review, they eventually turned to the Solar API from Google Maps Platform to help them overcome several issues they were facing with their incumbent residential data provider.
We would continually come back to the Solar API, as it seemed not only did the coverage improve wildly in a short amount of time, but also the accuracy of the data appeared to be improving as well.
Stephen Kozlen
Group Product Manager for WattPlan at Clean Power Research
The challenges
CPR’s WattPlan development team faced several key challenges with their previous residential rooftop and shading data, which didn’t always allow for the product to deliver the most accurate, objective solar estimates as intended.
- Data opacity: The team lacked clear visibility into their previous provider’s dataset and had concerns that it wasn’t up-to-date based on tests they ran.
- Inadequate coverage: The coverage was often limited to urban areas, and even in some of those regions, the quality of coverage was inconsistent. This made it difficult for the team to provide reliable estimates, especially for rural or underserved areas.
- Accuracy and freshness: The team noticed that the provider’s residential local shading data, crucial for understanding the solar potential for each part of the roof, didn’t seem to reflect the present day shading imposed by nearby buildings and trees.
“We have missed opportunities because even if we had good coverage for a majority of a utility’s area, there were sometimes neighborhoods that were important to the utility that might be missing from our previous solar dataset,” explains Stephen Kozlen, Group Product Manager for WattPlan.
The fact that we can confidently say our residential solar estimates, using the Solar API from Google Maps Platform, are now more accurate and more up-to-date is really important to us.
Stephen Kozlen
Group Product Manager for WattPlan at Clean Power Research
The switch to the Solar API
To maintain its competitive edge, the WattPlan team needed to find a new residential solar data provider that could offer the robust data, quality, coverage, and freshness it needed. Over the course of a year, the team thoroughly evaluated and tested different options.
“We would continually come back to the Solar API, as it seemed not only did the coverage improve wildly in a short amount of time, but also the accuracy of the data appeared to be improving as well,” Kozlen said. “There’s a resolution per meter metric that we look at when we’re doing a solar study for an area. Over the course of a year, we could see that the solar accuracy and coverage from Google Maps Platform improved significantly.”
After extensive testing and validation, Kozlen and his team decided to make the switch to the Solar API to estimate the potential solar generation of a home using the roof’s usable area, pitch, orientation, and shading.
Increasing geographical coverage
After switching to the Solar API, the WattPlan team dramatically increased their geographical coverage for solar assessments. In fact, some areas experienced up to a 90% increase in coverage.
Today, the Solar API covers over 95% of all buildings across the U.S., including rural areas. Adopting the Solar API into WattPlan expanded the company’s reach, making WattPlan more equitable and accessible for users nationwide, ensuring that even users in remote locations receive high-quality solar estimates.
This expanded coverage has strengthened WattPlan’s value proposition to its utility customers. As Kozlen puts it, “It’s definitely part of our sales story that we cover more area and provide increasingly accurate data.”
Furthering Clean Power Research’s mission
WattPlan’s success (over one million educated customers and counting) is just one part of CPR’s mission to accelerate the clean energy transformation.
Empowering utility customers with accurate, up-to-date solar assessments is critical, alongside factors like rate comparisons, buying an EV, adding a battery, and heat pump installations. “A core value of ours is objectivity, because the truth is solar may not be right for every home, right now. Our product objectively tells a user if solar is right or wrong for them given a range of factors including the solar potential of the house, the utility rates, and the user’s financial situation,” explains Kozlen. “The fact that we can confidently say our residential solar estimates, using the Solar API from Google Maps Platform, are now more accurate and more up-to-date is really important to us.”
Throughout the transition phase, Kozlen and his team continue to validate and test the data, and describe their current experience with the Solar API as “smooth sailing.”
Clean Power Research has been at the forefront of powering the global energy transformation for over 25 years. Clean Power Research supports the energy transformation with cloud-based software that empowers utilities and energy agencies to automate, streamline and scale critical business processes.
Industry: Technology
Location: United States
Products: Google Maps Platform, Solar API
Published 2024
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