E.On is preparing to launch its ‘Sunroof’ collaboration with Google in Great Britain.

E.On will offer its customers a digital assessment of the PV potential of their homes, free of charge and personally tailored. Sunroof combines technologies such as Google Earth and Google Maps, 3D models and machine learning, to assess a home’s individual solar potential. It calculates how much sunlight falls on each roof during the year, adding weather data, the position of the sun at different seasons, the area and inclination of the roof as well as the shade of surrounding buildings or trees. In the end, Sunroof ‘translates’ the amount of light into energy and the potential cost savings. The data are calculated by the software company Tetraeder, which is a in the sunroof project.

Based on this data, customers invest in a package of PV and E.On’s SolarCloud software, with Aura battery storage. E.On said it provides a ‘sunshine guarantee’ to ensure that the solar system achieves the calculated yields.

The offer has been running in Germany since May 2017 and will be extended there for another year. The company said over 10,000 customers there have requested a detailed initial analysis of their roof’s solar potential.

It will also be launched in Italy, according to E.On.