Solar Permit AppEngine Examples

It was a milestone that took over 50 years, and at last solar panel manufacturers can produce their modules for less than $1/Watt. Now, the renewable energy community is faced with the dilemma that the permitting and interconnection costs, i.e. the paperwork, is a significant fraction of the cost of a rooftop installation. To deploy gigaWatts of solar energy in the United States these costs need to drop. In response, the Department of Energy has made permitting part of its Sun Shot Initiative and SolarTech has launched its Solar Permitting Challenge. And now Google is pleased to announce Solar Permitting Code Examples to make it faster for software developers to be productive using AppEngine.
A small team of Googlers (Alex Martelli, Arjun Satyapal, Clay Murphy, Luke Stone, Ross Koningstein and Dave Fork) pooled their 20% time to help out. We tried to make the task of building a web based permitting application easier by providing examples of essential tasks in AppEngine including login, creating new permit requests, uploading files, and gathering statistics. Two different versions, one in Python and one in Java, were created.
We were inspired to create this code example by the work that SolarTech has done to promote faster permitting through its Solar Permitting Challenge, and by the Solar ABCs efforts to produce a simple, uniform process for solar permitting. The user login screen for the Python code example appears below.
Navigant consulting estimates that there are 700 gigaWatts of solar power generation resource on rooftops in the United States. Overall, we believe that efforts to streamline the workflow connected with rooftop solar installations could reduce the costs of installations by 50 cents/Watt. Please help us help the industry make this a reality.

Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems

Number 161 in the every growing CASA Working Paper Series is Building 3D Agent-Based Models for Urban Systems by A.T. Crooks, A. Hudson-Smith and A Patel in a collaboration between George Mason University, United States of America and here at Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), University College London.


There is a growing interest in relating agent-based models to real- world locations by combining them with geographical information systems (GIS) which can be seen with the proliferation of geosimulation models in recent years. This coincides with the proliferation of digital data both in the two and three dimensions allowing one to construct detailed and extensive feature rich and highly visual 3D city models. This paper explores some of these developments in relation to our own initial work on building 3D geospatial agent-based models of urban systems and the technologies that allow for such models to be created. Furthermore, we highlight some techniques for the creation of 3D agent-based models and stress that such models are not a substitute to good models.

 


 

The intention of this paper is to explore the recent advances in computer technology, software and associated techniques that allow for the creation of 3D agent-based models which can be used to simulate various aspects of city life focusing on our own initial research of creating 3D cityscapes and 3D agent-based models. The remainder of this paper will therefore explore our attempts to use digital data to create feature rich 3D cityscapes (Section 2), discuss why such cityscapes are important for ABM (Section 3), before moving into how advances in computer hardware allow for the creation of 3D agent-based models (Section 4); we then briefly explore a potential application domain, that of pedestrian modelling (Section 5). Section 6 presents techniques which we are currently utilizing to create 3D agent-based models through various linking and coupling approaches along with advantage and disadvantages of each approach before a discussion is presented (Section 7).

Download the full paper (748k pdf).

Google Earth: Imagery Update – Last Week of May

The Google Earth and Google Maps Imagery Team has just published its first batch of satellite and aerial imagery for June, and as always, there are all kinds of fascinating sites and features to check out.

Our first example image shown below is of the Sacred Heart church and its famous gilded dome located on the Notre Dame campus in Notre Dame, Indiana. A church has continuously occupied this site since 1830 and the current basilica foundation was laid in 1868. This aerial imagery was acquired in late April, 2011.

Basilica of the Sacred Heart, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana

When you’re done checking out the beautiful Notre Dame campus imagery, zoom over to Oregon and explore our new aerial imagery of the Salem region acquired this past summer. Below is a section of the Oregon Garden, a botanical garden located in Silverton. In the upper-right corner, you can see the only Frank Loyd Wright building in the state, the Gordon House. This home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was envisioned as a model of affordable homes for the local working-class citizens.

Oregon Garden, Silverton, Oregon
Finally, here’s a satellite image taken in December 2010 of the San Cristóbal Volcano. This active volcano rises above the town of Chichigalpa, locted in Chinandega, Nicaragua. In the image, you can see the gas and ash clouds emanating from the volcano’s caldera. These clouds and prevailing winds have served to remove all vegetation from the volcano’s southwestern flank.

San Cristóbal Volcano, Chichigalpa, Chinandega, Nicaragua.
Do you have a place you love for which you’d like to receive a notification when the Earth and Maps Imagery team updates the site? We’ve got just the tool: The Follow Your World application!

As always, these are but a few examples of the types of features that can be seen and discovered in our latest batch of published imagery. Happy exploring!

High Resolution Aerial Updates:
Fresno, CA; Huntington, WV; Laredo, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Manchester, NH; San Francisco Peninsula, CA; Salem, OR; Soldotna, AK; Southbend, IN; Sumter, SC; Victoria, TX.

Countries/Regions receiving High Resolution Satellite Updates:
Albania, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cape Verde, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Fiji, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Ghana, Greece, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar (Burma), Namibia, Nepal, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, St. Helena, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, West Bank, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia.

These updates are now available in both Google Maps and Google Earth. To get a complete picture of where we updated imagery, download this KML for viewing in Google Earth.