SolarSource: A general framework for evaluating rooftop solar potential

Homeowners don’t have a simple and accurate method to determine whether their homes are good candidates for a solar installation. This is problematic because a solar installation can both yield savings on electricity cost and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, recognized as the primary driver of global climate change. In this paper, we propose SolarSource, a universally applicable framework for evaluating rooftop solar potential. The framework is implemented as an Android mobile application and public RESTful API. The key insights are to provide homeowners with tools to construct a roof mapping themselves, to use a crowdsourcing platform (retrieving production statistics from actual solar arrays) to inform our analysis, and to implement the back end of the framework as a public API with an adaptable, open-source architecture. The main advantages of this approach are flexibility and adaptability: by providing tools for the homeowner to map her own roof, we enable universal coverage; a decoupled API provides software developers with access to our analysis tools; and an adaptable and open source architecture enables the open source community to augment the framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework produces reasonable estimates for solar potential compared to existing tools. A general-purpose and accurate framework helps uncover the financial benefits of solar for the widest audience possible, thereby facilitating the transition to a carbon-free energy future.