Rooftop solar is one of the most promising tools for drawing down greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and is cost-competitive with fossil fuels in many areas of the world today. One of the most important criteria for determining the suitability of a building for rooftop solar is the current age of its roof. The reason for this is simple -- because rooftop solar installations are long-lived, the roof needs to be new enough to last for the lifetime of the solar array or old enough to justify being replaced. In this paper we present a data-driven method for determining the age of a roof from historical satellite imagery, which removes one of the last obstacles to a fully automated pipeline for rooftop solar site selection. We estimate that a full solution to this problem would reduce customer acquisition costs for rooftop solar by $\sim$20\%, leading to an additional $\sim$750 megatons of CO$_2$ displaced between 2020 and 2050.

中文翻译：

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屋顶太阳能自动选址的屋顶年龄确定

屋顶太阳能是减少温室气体 (GHG) 排放量最有前途的工具之一，并且在当今世界许多地区与化石燃料相比具有成本竞争力。确定建筑物是否适合屋顶太阳能的最重要标准之一是其屋顶的当前年龄。原因很简单——因为屋顶太阳能装置寿命很长，屋顶需要足够新以维持太阳能电池阵列的使用寿命，或者足够旧以证明需要更换。在本文中，我们提出了一种从历史卫星图像确定屋顶年龄的数据驱动方法，该方法消除了屋顶太阳能选址全自动管道的最后障碍之一。我们估计这个问题的完整解决方案将使屋顶太阳能的客户获取成本降低 $\sim$20\%，