Photo courtesy of Fast Company.
New York City seems like it would be a difficult place to build a solar installation. But with so many buildings packed into a small area, the rooftops offer seemingly limitless potential.
A startup called Mapdwell, previously a Fast Company Innovation By Design award winner, has calculated how much.
Using its 3-D modeling and visualization technology combined with aerial data, it looks at more than one million buildings in New York City and identifies 11 gigawatts of “high yield photovoltaic potential” that could deliver over 13 million megawatt-hours per year. For those unfamiliar with energy terms like those, that’s equal to powering 1.2 million homes while offsetting the carbon emissions equivalent to planting more than 185 million trees, or $40 billion in business potential.
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Mapdwell, a company that spun out of MIT, has launched Solar System so far in nine cities, including Boston, Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado.
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Read the full article in Fast Company.
*Mapdwell has just launched in San Francisco, as well. You can read more about Mapdwell in the Autumn 2013 issue of Energy Futures.