GeoXploit helps find households suitable for solar energy

GeoXploit, the powerful but user-friendly package of mapping and geographical analysis tools from MapMechanics, is playing a key role in supporting and streamlining a nationwide drive by HomeSun Ltd to stimulate the take-up of solar-generated electricity in homes across Britain.

HomeSun is a pioneer of Free Solar – using the government-backed Feed-in Tariff, paid for all solar energy generated, to supply, install and maintain solar panels at no cost to homeowners. To do this, HomeSun needs to identify suitable sites for rooftop solar panel systems quickly and accurately.

GeoXploit is helping the company to reach as many potential customers as possible. HomeSun is using it to identify households suitable for solar energy, and to promote the concept to them.

GeoXploit combines the power GeoConcept, a high-end geographic information system, with the usability of a more consumer-oriented product. It has been designed to short-circuit the setup and learning processes and get users working with their mapping as quickly as possible, and many widely-used processes and functions are pre-configured for quick, convenient implementation.

The package includes a wide range of ready-to-use mapping, business data and demographic data from suppliers such as NAVTEQ, Royal Mail, Microsoft Bing and the Office of National Statistics – pre-configured for quick, convenient implementation.

Users can also import their existing customer or corporate data using drag-and-drop functionality, and HomeSun has taken advantage of this capability by importing a specialist data set into GeoXploit to identify households suitable for solar energy. This has enabled the company to assemble lists of properties and generate maps plotting prospect locations.

HomeSun is continuing to evaluate other ways in which GeoXploit could help the company, both operationally and in the marketing and planning processes. MapMechanics supplies GeoXploit complete with a full version of GeoConcept, so there is no constraint on the ways in which HomeSun could put it to further use.

HomeSun has been active since August last year, and recently equipped its one thousandth property with its photovoltaic solar panels. HomeSun Free Solar a is available to properties south of Hull with unobstructed roofs that face roughly south. Houses that are fitted can typically save about the third of their usual electricity costs, and reduce their carbon footprint by about 20 per cent. HomeSun provides support and maintenance for up to 25 years.