Solar power has enormous potential. But so far it’s not living up to that potential. In the U.S., for instance, solar provides less than 1 percent of the nation’s energy needs.

That’s in part because solar energy installations for homes are typically custom-made, expensive units. What’s needed is a new way to market and install solar energy. "Solar is going to be huge, but to get there it needs to smarten up its game," says Danny Kennedy, CEO of Sungevity, a solar-energy startup that is looking to take that step.

Based in Berkeley, Calif., and founded in 2008, Sungevity is aiming to become, as Fortune magazine called it, "the Dell of solar energy," using technology to create new efficiencies and better service customers.

A key part of that is the way Sungevity takes advantage of Microsoft’s Virtual Earth global mapping platform to lower the cost of solar energy installation, help homeowners easily see the value of solar energy, and make its usage more widespread.

Traditionally, a solar energy company would send a crew to a prospective customer’s home, measure the roof, calculate sun exposure of the location, and weeks later produce an estimate. "To go to a customer’s site, you have to spend money on a truck and people, drive out there and take all the measurements, then build an estimate for a system," says Kennedy. "That can take two or three weeks." And even then only one in 10 estimates resulted in a sale.

Sungevity’s approach is to eliminate the labor-intensive estimating cycle. Instead, a customer can do a self-assessment on Sungevity"s well-designed Web site. After entering a street address, a Virtual Earth photo of the house pops. Sungevity’s server-end algorithms work with Virtual Earth to determine the home’s latitude, the amount of sun it receives, what sort of shade is thrown by nearby trees, the electricity rates in the area (for calculating cost comparisons), and how much roof space the home has.

Within a day, a customer receives a detailed estimate, including the cost of five standard systems, estimated cost savings over 25 years, the potential increase in their home’s value, even an image showing what the installed solar system would look like. If an order is placed, a team from Sungevity can be on site within days.

Kennedy says that the use of Virtual Earth allows the company to make accurate, cost-effective estimates. In particular, Virtual Earth’s unique combination of viewpoints makes it possible for Sungevity to perform estimates remotely.

"With other earth-mapping products you can get a sense of the roofspace and get some measurements off it, but you don’t get the multiple views you get with Virtual Earth," says Kennedy. "We can use Virtual Earth to construct a three-dimension visual model of a home and get accurate dimensions of the roof area. We can calculate the sun hours of a site using its GPS coordinates. And we can take a location and run calculations on retail electricity rates, any rebates (for installing solar energy) in the era. It’s pushbutton automation — pretty cool stuff."

Sungevity has reduced the cost of a solar system by about 10 percent, and slashed the cost of performing estimates by 80 percent. Rather than building custom systems, Sungevity offers five standard solar installations that provide from 1.4 kilowatts to 5.6 kilowatts (a mid-range system provides about 70-80 percent of the electrical needs of a "typical" California home). The systems cost from $7,500 to $38,500, and can save buyers tens of thousands of dollars over a 20-year period.

Kennedy says that by putting estimates in a potential customer’s hands quickly and easily, Sungevity makes the idea of installing solar seem real and manageable. "It becomes a very real proposition to the customer," he says. "And if nothing else, we raise awareness of solar and how it’s a good investment."

In time, says Kennedy, companies such as Sungevity will pull solar out of its past as a cottage industry. By focusing on streamlining the process of installing solar energy, and using technology to squeeze out costs while improving customer service, Sungevity shows how solar can become an affordable commodity, not an exotic rarity. "We’ve taken a wind tunnel approach to every step of the process to squeeze out costs and improve efficiency," says Kennedy.

Sungevity currently is offering estimates in the San Francisco Bay area, with plans to expand throughout the state and then perhaps nationally.

Virtual Earth is Microsoft’s mapping and geospatial imaging tool that gives developers the very best in detailed earth images, including oblique "birds eye" and 3D views. It’s designed to help companies create powerful applications for customers wherever location-based information can be useful. It has proven its value in a wide range of environment-oriented applications, from helping scientists better understand stream flows, to improving responses to disasters such as oil spills, to tracking water supplies in drought-struck areas.

And at Sungevity, Virtual Earth is throwing new light on ways to make solar energy an everyday answer to reducing carbon production.

For more information on Virtual Earth, go to www.microsoft.com/virtualearth.