You can now estimate the amount of money, carbon offsets and houses that could be powered by placing solar panels on the roof of any structure in all of New York City, thanks to the startlingly powerful solar mapping tool, Mapdwell.

Through its estimation of how much light hits each rooftop for what amount of time each day, given the geography of the terrain, Mapdwell allows users to toggle a scale showing how many solar panels would lead to how much electrical savings each month, and how long it would take for the solar panels to pay for themselves, given various tax credits and a set electrical price and usage.

Head down to the Barclays Center and you’ll see that placing solar panels on the sunniest parts of its roof would cost $783,000 and save the center $70,700 each year in electric costs, a situation which Mapdwell estimates would take 11 years to fully pay for itself.

More than that, depending on how you look at it, the electricity it would have taken to supply the Barclays Center through the grid would be an offset of 298 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, or the equivalent of 6,940 trees planted.

I took a look at my own apartment, in leafy Greenpoint: To install enough panels to supply energy sufficient to get off the grid would cost my good-for-nothing, antagonistic landlord $6,580 and would take 5 years to pay for itself.

Mapdwell started several years ago as a spinoff of a project from MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab, where it mapped out Cambridge, Mass. Since then, it has mapped across the country, from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod.


Mapdwell explains its purpose as such:

Enabling communities with information in order to drive sustainable practices, community awareness, energy efficiency, and smart development through the aggregate effort of individuals. Mapdwell proposes an organic, bottom-up, collective approach to sustainability by delivering accurate, open, and unbiased information to increase education and spread knowledge.

It comes at a time when Google has also stepped into the solar mapping space. The search giant’s Project Sunroof offers some of the same information, but for fewer cities at this point. It only covers the Bay Area, Fresno, Calif., and the Boston area.

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