Way back in 2015, Google launched Project Sunroof, an ingenious Maps layer that combined location, sunlight and navigation data to show how much energy solar panels installed on a home’s roof might generate — it could be your house, could be your neighbor's, didn’t matter because Google mapped it out for virtually every house on the planet. This was a clever way to both help advance the company’s environmental sustainability efforts and show off the platform’s technical capabilities.
On Tuesday at the Google Cloud Next event, the company will officially unveil a suite of new sustainability APIs that leverage the company’s AI ambitions to provide developers with real-time solar potential, air quality and pollen level information. With these tools, “we can work toward our ambition to help individuals, cities, and partners collectively reduce 1 gigaton of their carbon equivalent emissions annually by 2030,” Yael Maguire, VP of Geo Sustainability at Google writes in a forthcoming Maps blog post.