What is SolarStudio?
An AI commercial-solar platform that turns an address into a board-ready proposal — lead sourcing & scoring, aerial roof design, an itemized financial model, and a built-in CRM. It covers the full lead → design → quote → close workflow in one place.
Who is it for?
Commercial and residential solar installers, EPCs, and sales reps — especially teams chasing large flat commercial roofs and ground-mount, which legacy resi-centric tools underserve.
Do I need a Google Solar API key?
No. SolarStudio runs fully keyless by default: trace the roof on aerial imagery and the NREL/PVWatts-style engine produces the estimate. Adding a Google Solar API key upgrades any covered address to measured roof segments, pitch, azimuth, and shading.
Where does the roof and sun data come from?
The Google Solar API (Building Insights) supplies roof geometry and shading from aerial imagery and a sun model. Irradiance comes from NREL PVWatts / NSRDB peak-sun-hours. Map imagery is keyless USGS & Esri; geocoding is the U.S. Census Geocoder; rooftop sourcing is OpenStreetMap.
How accurate is the shading and production?
With the Google Solar API, shading is LiDAR-grade — modeled hour-by-hour against real obstructions, per roof segment. The keyless fallback uses NREL irradiance with orientation and a human-in-the-loop shade rating. Either way, production follows kW × peak-sun-hours × 365 × derate × orientation × shading.
What incentives does the financial model include?
The 30% federal ITC (commercial 48E, with the begin-construction deadline flagged), Massachusetts SMART and net metering, plus utility-rate escalation and panel degradation. It's live-date accurate — e.g., the residential 25D credit expiry and MA's solar-only SMART base ≈ $0 are reflected, not glossed over.
Does it handle commercial and ground-mount, not just residential?
Yes — it's built commercial-first: multi-plane roofs, flat-roof tilt racking, open-land ground-mount, and commercial cost-per-watt. The lead engine and proposals are tuned for large systems.
How fast is it?
Minutes. Source a roof, pull or trace the geometry, set a few inputs, and generate a full itemized proposal — no site visit required to quote.
Does it replace my CRM?
It includes one — pipeline stages, contacts, activity timeline, and AI-drafted outreach — so design doesn't 'stop at the signature.' For larger teams, Enterprise can integrate with your stack.
What about data and security?
The app is keyless and self-seeds by default. Point it at a Supabase/Postgres database via two environment variables for durable, shared persistence. For production, enable row-level security and auth before wiring real contact data — see the
repo notes.