Evaluate building and solar design options in minutes, with Google Earth
By Okalo Ikhena, Director, Product Management, Google Sustainability
With nineteen years of experience mapping the world down to the city, street, and even infrastructure level, we have a unique understanding of the built environment, which contributes around 40% of total global energy-related CO2 emissions¹. We can leverage our understanding of the built environment and the designs and infrastructure decisions that shape it to help create a more sustainable future.
Today, sustainability professionals like you are time-crunched industry experts wearing many hats. You rely on multiple software solutions that don’t integrate and require time-consuming workarounds. You also often spend extra time finding up-to-date, accurate data to help identify ideal sites for your projects, and ensure that your projects are viable enough to be funded, approved, and ultimately built.
Because time-savings and efficiency are so important, we’re announcing the upcoming pilot of Professional Advanced from Google Earth. This new offering provides a set of no-code geospatial evaluation and analysis capabilities, enabling professionals in urban planning, real estate development, clean energy, and sustainability to:
- Easily identify optimal project locations
- Evaluate building and solar design options in minutes
- Make faster, more holistic decisions in early-stage design
- Complete site assessments
- Improve site selection
All of this happens within the real-world canvas of Google Earth. An early pilot of Professional Advanced will be available in the coming months as we focus on gathering feedback about the pilot from a small group of sustainability professionals in the U.S.
Building on our Preview of generative design, Professional Advanced streamlines all of your early stage workflows within Google Earth, introduces more powerful design editing capabilities, and provides new integrations with Google’s solar, tax lot, parcel and transportation and buildings emissions data.
Easily create building or solar designs, saving time
Professional Advanced from Google Earth enables you to make faster, more holistic decisions in the early-stage design, site assessment & site selection phases of building and solar development. You can virtually explore a site on Google Earth and evaluate early-stage feasibility for a building design or a solar site larger than 0.5 acres, reducing the need for in-person visits. Google’s machine learning enables you to generate building and solar designs at scale and evaluate dozens of metrics across quality of life, financials, regulatory and sustainability outcomes.
Whether you are a real estate or solar energy professional who wants to find new potential sites to develop, you can input your development project requirements with Google’s data to quickly identify and validate ideal building and solar design options.
Collaborate with stakeholders to make efficient, data-driven decisions
Now you can streamline your early stage workflows all within Google Earth, leveraging our real-world canvas and design generation tools to quickly create, visualize and share your projects with stakeholders. Cloud-based collaboration in Google Drive enables you to easily compare the best project locations with stakeholders for site selection. Experts on your team can also test out financials, energy use assumptions and site constraints so everyone can make data-driven business decisions on the spot.
For example, if you are an architect designing a multi-building site, you can now use Google Earth to easily explore design configurations that meet your financial, livability and sustainability goals. You can then seamlessly share design proposals for review with key stakeholders.
Use detailed data from Google to optimize designs and build sustainably
Integration with Solar API
Professional Advanced utilizes Google Earth’s real-world model, with rich, detailed geospatial data, photorealistic 3D maps and global satellite imagery catalogs. It now integrates with the Solar API from Google Maps Platform to enable solar feasibility assessment for large commercial roofs and parking lots. With the Solar API integration, you can evaluate solar feasibility quickly for early stage designs with advanced solar data and rooftop imagery, for over 40 countries and 472M buildings.
Access Google’s tax lot, parcel, transportation and building emissions data
With Professional Advanced, you now have access to Google’s tax lot, parcel, transportation and building emissions data. Using the tax lot and parcel data, you can point and click on areas to quickly understand zoning implications for areas you are looking to develop. This can help you balance zoning and land use requirements with your quality of life and financial goals to determine the best building designs and solar options for your project site. With Google’s latest transportation and building emissions data, you can assess the impact of transportation, parking options, construction materials and building operations, to understand the tradeoffs of each in your projects.
For example, if you are a clean energy developer, you can use Google Earth to evaluate the financial and climate benefits of solar and other on-site sustainability options for new construction and surrounding buildings. You can model sustainability projects that maximize return and sustainability impact and share the proposed project for review with key stakeholders.
Join us in reducing CO2 emissions in the built environment
We welcome you to try Professional Advanced from Google Earth, and see how it can help you efficiently create building and solar designs in minutes, all while building sustainably. Sign up to the waitlist to try it out in the coming months! Also, check out additional new capabilities Google Earth is announcing that make it easier to manage your projects and collaborate with others.
[1]: Global Alliance for Building and Construction — “2020 Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction”
