Portland's new Web site should spark the area

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The site will also detail potentiall carbon andenergy savings, as well as how much a consumere could save using various tax credits and other City officials say the called the Oregon Clean Energy Map, will boost the profile of one of the state’as fastest growing industries and promote Portland as a national hotbed of soladr energy activity. “The idea is to reall get people excited about solar and show them that othedr people in the community are doing it and that soladr worksin Portland,” said Lee solar program coordinator for the city’s Bureau of Planninbg and Sustainability. The project is the resulg of Portland’s designation as a Solad America City, a U.S.
Department of Energhy program in which 25 cities receive a totalof $4.9 million in grants and technicao assistance to invest in solard technology. The city received a two-year $200,000 cash grant as part of the It also receivesabout $250,000 in technicapl assistance from the Department of Energy, which coverexd the estimated $30,000 cost of the Oregojn Clean Energy Map. Portland will become one of about a dozenj of the Solar America cities to use the program to deploy solaer map Web sites in a projec t being led out of the Portland officeof , the global engineering firm headquartered near Denver that was foundeds in Corvallis.
The idea was spawned a few years ago afte r San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom launched a goal ofhavinvg 10,000 San Francisco rooftops adornef with solar photovoltaic systems by 2010. San Francisco then contracted with CH2M Hill to come up witha “The No. 1 thing they needed to do is educateethe public,” said Steph Stoppenhagen, who is leadingf the solar mapping initiative out of CH2M Hill’ offices near Portland State San Francisco’s solar map was launchee two years ago, with CH2M Hill retaininh the licensing rights to the prograjm so it could offer it to otherd cities. Using Google Map satellite images, CH2M Hill’s system prompts users to type intheire address.
The map zooms in and highlightstheif rooftop. A box will pop up detailinf the roof’s square footage, its estimated photovoltaic potential, the amounft of electricity a solar electric systejcould produce, how much electricity would be savedx per year, and how many pounds of carbon would be sparedr by employing a system. In a separate box, userz can get price estimates for varying sizes of residential and commercial The Web site will then calculate discounts from incentive and taxcrediy programs, which in Oregon can account for up to 80 percent of the cost of a CH2M Hill can add or subtract features if Salt Lake City, for example, is consideringf a feature that would allow users to judge aestheti appeal by dragging and dropping picture s of commonly used solar panels onto the imagd of their roof.
In Sacramento, the companyh worked with the electric utility on a functiojn that allows users to see how much monety they would have saved on previous electrif bills by using a solarphotovoltaifc system. Portland’s map, for now, will be a basid version, with dots showingy existing photovoltaic and solar thermal installations while helpingb users calculate the cost savings and benefitd of installing solar ontheir rooftop. It will also featurwe a thermometer denotingthe city’s progress in reaching its goal of hostiny 5 megawatts of installed solar energu systems by 2012. The city is now at 3.2 megawatts. Unlikre other cities, Portland optedr not to call the sitea “Solare Map.
” Instead, it chose the name Oregon Clean Energy Map out of the hope that othetr municipal governments might want to work with the city on expanding the map’s territory, which now just coverds Portland and Multnomah County.