SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Solar businesses, installers, and designers supporting the $10.8 billion solar industry will now benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) data sets, access to a wide range of solar design tools, and better API integration, following a renewed solar push in North America by leading aerial imagery and location intelligence company Nearmap. 

Nearmap supports solar customers in North America to identify and qualify leads, more accurately estimate the solar power potential of properties, and plan and design installations.

“We’ve learned from an overwhelming majority of our customers that they want to choose how they use Nearmap content in their business," said Tony Agresta, general manager of North America, Nearmap. "This includes having the flexibility to access properties instantly through Nearmap MapBrowser, or via solar solution providers that deliver on their own platforms solar designs, proposals, and cost-saving estimates.

"The solar market is highly competitive, with many software providers creating specific tools to improve the workflows of solar professionals. Nearmap is responding by adding flexibility, better integrations, and market-leading content — including high-resolution aerial imagery and artificial intelligence data sets — to better support our solar customers in North America.”  

Solar customers can now access Nearmap AI data sets to help them make faster and more accurate decisions. This will also support their workflows to improve the performance of their sales and services teams. With "Nearmap AI," solar installers and designers can visualize properties remotely, instantly view solar panels and vegetation layers, and clearly visualize how these attributes can assist their projects.

Nearmap AI is built on a layer of content that uses machine learning to turn Nearmap high-resolution imagery into information and insights, creating one of the most accurate and richest AI offerings in the market. 

What this means for customers is that they can analyze huge numbers of properties and areas efficiently, without a person needing to look at the imagery. Customers can integrate the AI data directly into their applications to pull data for any property at a  specific location and point in time, within seconds.  

The latest Nearmap AI offering delivers 200-plus facts per address including building heights and stories. Nearmap also processes machine learning on its 3D data for richer insights about attributes including buildings, solar panels, and vegetation, in addition to Nearmap high-resolution 2D imagery.

“Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have come of age," said Agresta. "Nearmap can do things with AI that nobody else can do — because of our 3D content, and because of the currency and consistency of our coverage. The insights that Nearmap AI provides are transformative for our customers.”

As a consequence of the refreshed solar strategy in North America, Nearmap is no longer selling the "Nearmap on OpenSolar" product in North America. Current subscribers will be able to use "Nearmap on OpenSolar" until May 1, 2022. 

"Nearmap is a location analytics company," Agresta said. “Our strengths are directly tied to the efficiency of our captures and the delivery of high-resolution aerial content at scale. Nearmap also provides the only scalable artificial intelligence solution in the industry. We will continue to expand our coverage in North America, which already covers 108 million-plus properties in the region. Nearmap will also continue to deliver enhanced forms of aerial content and create flexible APIs to allow our partners to integrate our content into their solar design workflows."

Solar companies have made huge progress in solar design, integrating Nearmap imagery to assist in that design. Nearmap will support an even larger range of solar design partners in North America — via standards-compliant APIs — including Aurora Solar, Enphase, Helioscope, OpenSolar, Solar Nexus, SOLO, and many other companies.