Portland's new Web site should spark the area

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The site will also detail potential carbon andenergyt savings, as well as how much a consumer coulcd save using various tax credits and othefr incentives. City officials say the called the Oregon CleanEnerghy Map, will boost the profilse of one of the state’xs fastest growing industries and promote Portland as a national hotbed of solar energy activity. “The idea is to reall y get people excited about solar and show them that other people in the communit y are doing it and that solat worksin Portland,” said Lee Rahr, solar programj coordinator for the city’s Bureau of Planning and The project is the result of Portland’as designation as a Solar Americz City, a U.
S. Department of Energy program in whicj 25 cities receive a totalof $4.9 milliojn in grants and technical assistance to invest in solar The city received a two-yea $200,000 cash grant as part of the It also receives about $250,000 in technica assistance from the Department of which covered the estimated $30,000 cost of the Oregon Clean Energy Map. Portland will become one of aboutg a dozen of the Solar Americaw cities to use the program to deployt solar map Web sites in a project being led out of the Portlanx officeof , the global engineering firm headquartereed near Denver that was founded in Corvallis.
The idea was spawnedd a few years ago after San Franciscl Mayor Gavin Newsom launched a goal ofhaving 10,00o0 San Francisco rooftops adorned with solar photovoltaic systemas by 2010. San Francisco then contracted with CH2M Hill to come up witha “The No. 1 thing they needed to do is educate the saidSteph Stoppenhagen, who is leadinb the solar mapping initiativs out of CH2M Hill’s offices near Portland Statse University. San Francisco’s solar map was launched two years ago, with CH2M Hill retainingf the licensing rights to the prograjm so it could offer it toothed cities.
Using Google Map satellite CH2M Hill’s system prompts usersd to type in their The map zooms in and highlightzstheir rooftop. A box will pop up detailing the roof’a square footage, its estimated photovoltaic potential, the amount of electricity a solar electric systemcoulcd produce, how much electricity would be saved per and how many pounds of carbon would be spared by employing a In a separate box, users can get price estimatees for varying sizes of residentiaol and commercial systems.
The Web site will then calculate discountsx from incentive and tax credit which in Oregon can account for up to 80 percentf of the cost of a CH2M Hill can add or subtract featuresif necessary. Salt Lake for example, is considering a featurr that would allow users to judge aestheticd appeal by dragging and dropping pictures of commonly used solar panelas onto the image oftheir roof. In the company worked with the electric utility on a functionj that allows users to see how much monety they would have saved on previous electric bills by usingg a solarphotovoltaic system.
Portland’s map, for now, will be a basicx version, with dots showing existing photovoltaic and sola thermal installations while helping users calculate the cost savingss and benefits of installing solar ontheir rooftop. It will also featurde a thermometer denotingthe city’s progress in reaching its goal of hostingy 5 megawatts of installed solar energy systems by 2012. The city is now at 3.2 Unlike other cities, Portland opted not to call the sitea “Soladr Map.
” Instead, it chose the name Oregonm Clean Energy Map out of the hope that othef municipal governments might want to work with the city on expandingf the map’s territory, which now just covers Portlans and Multnomah County.