The National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) launched an interactive website that shows exactly where solar installations are being installed, how big they are, how much they cost and how fast the industry is booming.
Open PV is part of a large the larger Open Energy Information initiative, which aims to share information to accelerate the deployment clean energy technologies across the country and around the world.
It contains an assortment of interactive maps and charts that detail PV installation activity in the U.S. from 1998 to 2009.
Want to know how fast the cost per watt is plunging in Wisconsin or California? Push "Explore" on the Web site to open the PV Market Mapper application and call up any state in the nation to see graphs on the number of PV installations, cost and capacity over time. You can even focus in by zip codes and neighborhoods to see where panels are being installed.
"We’re building a community of users who are willing to share information about PV installations," said Christopher Helm, a Geographic Information System (GIS) developer and project manager for the Open PV project. "The project is a living, breathing and dynamic database that people can use to explore the U.S. PV market in essentially real-time."
The Open PV project team is accepting data uploads from utility companies, local and state governments and the public. So far they have catalogued more than 64,000 systems with a total capacity of about 733 megawatts.
The two largest solar trade groups, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the Solar Electric Power Association, are fans of the Open PV project and are encouraging their members to use the maps and graphs as tools to grow their businesses.
Installers can use the data to examine their positions in the market and, when they share data, can benefit from the name-recognition that goes with it.
"If people want to see the three or five top installers in their neighborhood, they’ll be able to zoom in and find that out," Quinby said. "If they want to know the installers in their region, they’ll be able to find that too."
Source: NREL
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