In order to make households in Sweden see and understand the full potential of solar energy we created The Suncell Guide. A digital tool and service making it easier than ever for people to find out how they could benefit from solar panels on their house. In order to create this tool we gathered geographic/solar data, solar panel effectiveness data and architectural data. And we presented the data in a very accessible and visible way. Just enter your street address, mark up your roof, adjust the roof-angles and set the cardinal directions of your house - and then you get your own personal calculation that shows the potential of solar panels for your household. It's the first time these different types of data has been combined and used in large scale.

The Suncell Guide is a responsive digital tool/service which can be reached through Vattenfall's website. After entering your address it shows you your house on Google Maps, where you can mark up the area you want to use for solar panels. In order to develop the tool we utilized databases, API:s and javascripts and made some serious calculations. The marked-up area in Google Maps shows how many square meters you have available for solar panels, while the roof-angels and cardinal directions calculate the amount of sun reaching you roof. When all is set the tool presents the amount of energy you can collect (in kWh) and the amount of money you’d save every year. This tool can be used by all house owners in Sweden and it's currently being implemented in Finland.

Our mission was to increase the number of estimate requests for solar panels. And we did. After the launch of The Suncell Guide, estimate requests have increased by as much as 370 percent, which is equivalent to a potential sales value of more than 5 million USD. Every day, all year round, hundreds of people are using the tool to see what solar panels could mean for their energy and cost savings. Furthermore, the service was highly engaging. The average time spent on the Vattenfall website, testing the tool and reading more about solar panels is as high as 7 minutes. We can also see that people who first tried solar panels on their house, went on to try it on their company. The future of renewable energy looks bright.