Recently in apps Category

Today we released an update to our California Solar Initiative data navigator.  The new version is much more efficient and provides additional ways for you to visualize the residential solar industry in Calfornia.

Some of the biggest changes include the introduction of treemaps to navigate the vendor landscape and heatmaps to see where they're active across the state. 

The treemaps allow you to see the dominant solar companies in California in a single glance.  You can browse by the most popular installers, sellers, manufacturers, models or cities.  Click on a company at any time to see all of its completed solar installations that received funding through CSI since 2007.

We hope that you'll find this interesting information.  This week, our development team is hard at work getting our initial solar platform release ready for our alpha testers to take a spin next week.  If you're interested in seeing what it's all about - direct message @opensolar and I can send you an invite.

Check out our CSI Browser and let us know what you think!

The extension of federal solar investment tax credits, coupled with state and city rebates are making it easier than ever to go solar these days.  Thinking about taking the plunge?  Would you be interested in seeing a list of solar installations in your area and how much each one cost per installed watt?

Our CSI Browser lets you navigate completed installations that received incentives through the California Solar Initiative from 2007 - 2009.  Solar panel installations doubled in California in 2008 and this tool helps show you how it happened.

One of the most interesting features is the price per watt graph. Price per watt is a key metric for measuring the real cost of an installation - yet as the CSI Browser shows, actual price per watt values vary greatly from one PV system to the next.

In the above graph we can see the price per watt for completed CSI installations registered as "Self-Install" over the past two years.  The values range from $3 to $13, with the average price for a self install hovering around $8/watt ($6/watt after the CSI incentive).

When you click on an item in the list, or a node on the graph - it will pull up information about that particular installation.

The description includes the system size, total cost, the CSI incentive payment and a description of the system - who it was installed by and what solar components it uses.  You can filter the installation results by clicking on the installer, PV module, inverter or manufacturer.  Check out the highly fragmented installer business or look up market share for the major solar manufacturers.

The CSI data is not perfect and the browser is a work in progress, but it should give you a sense of what we're up to at Open Solar.  We've got an open platform that we use to gather data about solar installations. Over the next several weeks we'll be introducing new features and functionality which will bring Open Solar to the networks of Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Google and LinkedIn.

Information like average price per watt by installer make for interesting data points, but the real story behind every solar installation is a human one.  The goal of our Open Solar social app is to make it extraordinarily easy for users to capture that story and share it with friends and solar fans alike. 

Try the CSI Browser - and tell us what you think.