Considering Solar? Check out OpenSavings.

How popular is solar PV in your area and how much are people saving? How much does solar cost? What if you live in a San Francisco apartment or a mobile home in Sonoma, versus a typical home in LA?

Save by Genability is a new initiative that sheds light on key questions homeowners have when considering solar. Underlying the Save website is OpenSavings, an open source API created by Genability to help the solar industry quickly figure out location specific metrics that drive solar adoption: electricity costs, solar costs, system production and how popular solar is in the area. Simply input a zip code and get location and building specific cost savings data in an accurate and easy to use format. This data can be useful in several ways, including to baseline electricity costs, identify new solar markets, or to better target solar lead generation.

OpenSavings ranks cities based on their potential aggregate solar savings, which takes into account each city’s specific building mix and the percentage of the total stock occupied by owners. To do this, Genability combined utility rate and typical usage data, with PVWatts, OpenPV, Census, and other data sets analyzed, to run and combine many cost savings scenarios.

Savings are broken down within a city based on building type and usage scenario. Since most homeowners are unfamiliar with their usage, or energy consumption, Genability provides cost savings results for typical homes (attached or detached home, apartment in a small or large building, and mobile home), with low, high and average usage scenarios. Keep in mind that OpenSavings results are not site specific but represent average cases. In the future, we plan to evaluate many more scenarios (e.g., different system designs and tariff switches) to provide richer and more granular data.

OpenSavings data is currently available for CA but we plan to expand coverage nationally over the coming months, with priority on the top 25 solar states. Sign up at Save by Genability if you’d like us to keep you posted on our progress.