To accurately map the solar potential of buildings, enwarp takes into account a multitude of factors, such as where the roof is located and which direction it faces, whether there are tall trees or neighboring buildings creating shadows over its surface, and how the sun travels over that location throughout the year, to name a few. To make these calculations for as many buildings as possible, the company decided to leverage the vast amount of solar data available through the Solar API from Google Maps Platform.

enwarp uses its software to combine the raw data with cadastral information, which includes details of a building’s ownership, tenure, and precise location. This way, the company can calculate results that are tailored to individual homeowners. This distinction is very important in Europe, where the roof of one building as seen from aerial images often shelters multiple households.

Initially, enwarp developed its solar atlas using two combined datasets provided by local governments – one made from a laser scan using an airplane and another from high-resolution aerial images. By overlapping the two datasets, enwarp could calculate the height and location of each roof on a map. But there were significant limitations to this way of working. 

One big challenge was that the overlapping datasets should ideally have been collected at the same time, but this wasn’t something enwarp could control. “We had access to aerial images updated every two years, matched with laser images updated every five years, and the result is a mismatch. We could see new roofs on the image that the laser scan didn’t account for. This was a big issue for our software, but it was solved by using the Solar API raw data instead, which is updated on a regular basis,” Fichtner explains.