Ever wonder what potential your roof has for solar power generation ? To answer this question now there is a website ( Roofray ) that is looking to help answer all of those queries using satellite data and a hands-on web site. Basically it’s a solar clearinghouse that uses Google satellite data and info from the National Renewable Energy Labs to help users make good decisions about what sort of system to buy.

Here’s how it works: enter an address, pull up the satellite image of the chosen building’s rooftop and then using the RoofRay tool based on Google maps, draw your solar arrays ( YouTube video attached). Data on square footage of the system, slope of the roof, power per square foot and total peak power all show up in a chart, and the info displayed depends on how big you’ve drawn your system.

After drawing the panels you can dive into metrics based on the size and location of your solar system, including projected performance, financial analysis, average monthly utility bill after solar is added, total cost summary and, our favorite, time until the system pays for itself. The biggest potential of the site for the user could be the ability to test out how good a home’s solar potential is before buying it. - Via

SMIT (Sustainably Minded Interactive Technology) latest technological innovation, the GROW panel, trumps both conventional solar panels and wind turbines in harnessing natural energy. Combining the best of green tech and ecology, GROW draws inspiration from ivy growing on the side of a building - resulting in a hybrid energy delivery device of flexible, ivy-like fluttering solar leaves that provide power via both sun and wind. Using a series of flexible solar cells as leaves, GROW takes the shape of ivy growing on a building- the leaves are solar cells while the wind that causes them to flutter is harvested as viable energy using a series of piezoelectric generators on the underside of each leaf. The GROW leaves are made from 100% recyclable polyethylene covered with thin film photovoltaic modules encapsulated in Tefzel.

The solar leaves need to be wired together in order to collect the energy they produce, but the system is extremely flexible allowing it to be installed on a building no matter what shape it is. It’s also extremely easy to maintain since replacing a single leaf when it fails doesn’t require you to take down the entire installation. - Via - Inhabitat