4-page Case Study - Posted 10/6/2008
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Solar Energy Company Cuts Estimate Costs 80 Percent with Microsoft Mapping Technology
Sungevity wanted to avoid the traditional cost, liability, and management overhead of traveling to customers’ homes to measure rooftops to calculate estimates for solar energy systems. To make solar energy affordable and accessible to “every homeowner with a view of the sun,” says Chief Executive Officer Danny Kennedy, the company uses Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology to capture roof dimensions remotely. At Sungevity.com, customers type in their address, identify their rooftop from an aerial photo, and get a free online quote, usually within 24 hours. The company provides estimates around 27 days faster than the industry standard and at only 20 percent of the usual cost, and cut the price of a new solar system by around 10 percent. In less than six months, the company has provided nearly 2,000 Internet-based quotes, and is expanding its business with proactive marketing.
Situation
Founded in 2007 and based in the San Francisco Bay area, Sungevity designs and installs home solar energy systems as a cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative to nonrenewable options such as gas and coal. Its mission is to make solar energy available to every homeowner who wants to make a wise investment and have a positive environmental impact, but to do so it must revolutionize the market. In the United States, for example, solar power currently provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s energy needs. “There are only about a million solar installations on earth. And we want to make it a half billion by 2054,” says Danny Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer of Sungevity. “We want to make it simple and efficient for any homeowner with a view of the sun to go solar.”
One challenge is that most residential solar energy installations are expensive, thanks in part to a labor-intensive and time-consuming estimate process. Traditionally, solar energy companies send a crew to a prospective customer’s home to climb onto the roof and use a tape measure, a protractor, and a compass to capture the necessary four measurements of its installable area—length, width, pitch (angle), and azimuth (orientation)—needed to calculate a home’s sun exposure. This process requires investing in trucks, qualified crews, and liability insurance; managing estimate appointments; and spending time driving to customers’ homes. On average in the industry, it takes three weeks to set up a visit during working hours when customers are at home, and another week to produce an estimate—and only one in ten estimates results in a sale. When Kennedy founded Sungevity, he was determined to create a new business model that avoids this overhead by instead performing only remote estimates.
Sungevity wanted to streamline the traditional estimate process, to make solar energy more convenient, affordable, and attractive to consumers. This would require creating a software solution that would support remote, online estimates through the use of aerial imagery and a mapping technologies that offered superior visual detail and technical functionality to remotely capture the data needed to calculate sun exposure.
Solution
From February through April 2008, the company investigated several products to integrate with the solution it was building, including Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ online mapping technology. “Virtual Earth was the only product with superior visual detail that we found that offered oblique-angle imagery with its bird’s eye view, which our solution uses for sizing roofs,” says Kennedy. The company also preferred the technical support options and image quality and geographical coverage that come with Virtual Earth.
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It’s hard to calculate the exact dollar benefits of this solution because it’s a ‘disruptive’ technology… But I can say that the success of our business is enabled by our Virtual Earth–based solution. |
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Danny Kennedy Chief Executive Officer, Sungevity |
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Once Sungevity designed the estimate solution, which is based on a customer relationship management (CRM) system customized for the solar industry, development took only four weeks. Sungevity subcontracted to Australian Web development company Extro Interactive to build the solution, which has been accessible on Sungevity’s Web site since Earth Day, on April 22, 2008.
Customers in the San Francisco Bay area who are interested in a quote can type in their street address, select an aerial view of their roof, provide contact information and (optional) yearly energy consumption figures, and request a quote. Sungevity’s tool captures the house’s global positioning (GP) coordinates through Microsoft MapPoint® 2006 mapping software, and the company uses this data to capture the four measurements of the installable area with a sizing tool that plugs into Sungevity’s Web-based CRM system and works with the bird’s eye view feature in Virtual Earth. The GP coordinates for the four corners of a roof indicate where each point is on the surface of the earth, and how far away each point is from the others. Using the sizing tool, Sungevity also calculates the house’s solar potential by relating the GP coordinates with the path of the sun. Then, they factor in local electricity rates and how much shade is thrown by trees or other objects to determine the different sizes and design of solar energy installations that will work best for each home.
Usually within 24 hours of receiving a customer’s inquiry and data, Sungevity sends the customer an e-mail message with a link to an interactive, online quote, called an iQuote. The iQuote contains illustrations of the various sizes and types of solar installations available to the customer, who can click on each to see what it would look like installed on the house, along with statistics for each system: cost, payment options, estimated electricity cost savings over 25 years, a list of environmental benefits, and how much of the customer’s electricity would come from solar power. The customer can call Sungevity to ask questions or order a solar system online without ever speaking with a consultant. After signing a paper contract, the customer can select a date for a home visit and an installation date.
Sungevity has Macintosh personal computers on-site that its engineers use to access the estimate solution and run the company’s other line-of-business applications. For its off-site services, such as running its Web site, Sungevity uses a dedicated hosting firm based in San Francisco, California.
Benefits
Sungevity uses Virtual Earth to make accurate, cost-effective, remote estimates more quickly and affordably than ever before. With its new patent-pending solution, the company is opening the solar market to new customers and marketing its systems in ways that are unique in the industry.
New Markets and New Ways of Marketing
The company is using its solution to proactively market its products—a first in the residential solar industry. “We can mail free custom quotes to people in our service area—even those who have never heard of us, or may never have considered solar installations before because of the traditional time and costs involved in on-site estimates. This isn’t possible with the industry-standard system of manual measurements and estimates,” says Kennedy. “Remote estimates add a whole new dimension to our business.”
Sungevity aims to expand throughout California by the end of 2008 and then nationally and globally.
Quick and Cost-Effective Remote Estimates
The combination of overhead and oblique views of a house in Virtual Earth makes it possible for Sungevity to perform estimates remotely. “With other earth-mapping products, you don’t get the multiple views that Virtual Earth offers,” says Kennedy. “Our solution offers push-button automation—pretty cool stuff. We don’t need protractors and tape measures anymore.”
Remote, automated quotes cut most of the time, expense, and liability of formulating estimates. Kennedy says, “Now, engineers don’t have to climb onto customers’ rooftops to create estimates, which means that many fewer chances of our people falling off a ladder.”
In the five months the solution has been live, the company has provided more than 2,000 quotes. Sungevity has reduced the cost of a solar system by about 10 percent, and the cost of performing estimates by 80 percent. Kennedy notes, “It’s hard to calculate the exact dollar benefits of this solution because it’s a ‘disruptive’ technology—it changes the entire game. But I can say that the success of our business is enabled by our Virtual Earth–based solution.”
Microsoft Virtual Earth
The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services providing quality geospatial data, rich imagery, cutting edge technology, and dependable performance that helps organizations visualize data and provide immersive end-user experiences. With ongoing investments in innovation driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new map detail and imagery, feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.
For more information, visit:
www.microsoft.com/virtualearth
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Sungevity products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.sungevity.com
For more information about Extro Interactive products and services, visit the Web site at: www.extro.com.au
