AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the rage right now. It is beginning to seep into solar panel layout and design work already. The tool we often use to lay out solar panels on roofs has a new AI imagery tool that renders images based on a prompt, and it’s pretty amazing.

While AI has a long way to go to be a true game-changer, the progress in just the past year has been mindblowing. Check out what this tool can do…

Here is the basic model we fed into the AI tool:

We fed it into the AI tool with the following prompt and it returned the image below:

A house with black solar panels on the roof in a gated community with landscaping you would find in Florida, including palm trees with a beige stucco wall and gray tile roof, including a swimming pool with a screen enclosure.

Admittedly, it didn’t get things perfect by any means, but it’s truly amazing that it transformed our model into a rendering with some degree of photorealism. After updating the prompt to the following, check out how it was improved.

A house with black solar panels on the roof in a gated community with landscaping you would find in Florida including palm trees with a beige stucco wall and gray colored tile roof, including a swimming pool with a screen enclosure. Add a person lounging by the pool. Show the ocean in the background.

It’s still not perfect, as it’s missing the person, and the ocean is a bit weird, but it made the roof gray, at least. We’re getting much closer to the intent of the rendering. I can only imagine what we will see in the years to come as these tools evolve.

Here are a few more renderings from this model that I grabbed from other angles with various prompts to test things out. Some images clearly did not hit the mark, but the AI engine came up with some interesting ideas. To be fair, I was feeding it some pretty crazy prompts like “underwater house with basket weaver in front.”

I can’t wait until AI takes my job! Haha, there will probably still be something for me to do, but these AI tools are going to make things very interesting over the next few years. Designing solar panel systems will surely become easier. We have had analytical tools for some time now where the computer will fill viable roof faces with solar panels, but those rely on simple math and geometry. AI will eventually to be able to spot obstructions on the roof and come up with the most efficient layouts that take into account specific features of the equipment being used. Hopefully, AI will be able to do electrical designs for us, which can take quite a bit of time to draw out and get everything aligned, understandable, and code-compliant.

And NO – this article was not written by an AI chatbot. I wrote it with my own brain and fingers. 🙂