You can now Google your house to see if you should go solar

Google has put itself on the map by funding more than $2 billion in renewable energy projects.

Now the search giant wants to map the amount of sunlight your rooftop receives — and help you decide if it makes financial sense to go solar.

Dubbed Project Sunroof, the recently released online tool enables you to type in your address and find out how much space you have for solar panels on your roof, how many hours of rooftop sunlight you’ll get a year, and how much money you’d save.

After typing in your address, a Google Earth image of your home and the surrounding neighborhood appears, with the roofs appearing in colors ranging from purple to yellow to indicate how much sunlight is striking the surface. The photos, however, appear in some cases to be at least one or two years old. Read more...