Emissiv exists to break the Cooling Paradox with transparent radiative cooling coatings. The number that decides where that coating matters most is a roof’s reflectance. So we built the engine that measures it, nationwide, for free.
Cooling already takes around a tenth of the world’s electricity, and demand is set to double by 2050. Every new air conditioner burns power and vents heat, which raises temperatures, which calls for more cooling. Emissiv’s answer is not a bigger machine. It is a coating that harnesses the power of deep space, shedding heat passively to the coldest sink there is.
A radiative cooling surface works by reflecting solar energy and radiating heat away. Albedo, solar reflectance, is not a side detail of the product. It is its core performance number. That means a tool that measures roof albedo from orbit is not a different business. It is a map of where the heat, and the opportunity, are.
The darkest roofs are the ones that need Emissiv most. Now we can find every one of them.
We stress tested the prototype, found where it was guessing, and fixed it with free data and free labels, nothing bought, nobody waited on.
And the engine no longer reads just one number. Each roof comes back as a full record, every layer free: reflectance, the metric the coating moves; material from authoritative OS NGD data for most roofs (our real-label model as the fallback), with LiDAR geometry as a physics constraint; the roof shape itself, pitch, orientation, height and form; the building behind the roof, its use, construction era and EPC energy rating, joined free by UPRN, so a commercial target is sized by who actually carries a cooling load rather than a guess; and the planning reality, listed or conservation-area, so coating eligibility is known before a call. It now also models how hot each roof actually runs, a peak surface temperature from reflectance and a per-material thermal emittance, so a reflective-looking metal roof that is secretly baking gets flagged rather than missed. For every dark roof it then sizes the prize directly, with Emissiv’s 95% reflective coating: the annual energy, cost and CO₂ avoided, costed against the live national grid.
That record is a drop-in superset of the Google Solar API: we mirror its per-roof geometry schema (pitch, azimuth, plane height, area) and add the layers nobody else holds: solar reflectance, material, and how hot each roof actually runs. Match their fields, extend them.
Every figure is regenerable from a script, labelled measured or projected. See the full report →
On a single clear day, free thermal satellite (Landsat 8 thermal, May 2026) put the built surfaces of one UK estate at 41.4°C, peaking near 44.8°C, far above the air temperature around them. That surface heat load, soaked up by dark, low-albedo roofs, is exactly what Emissiv’s coating is built to shed.
The Cooling Paradox is not abstract. It is 44.8 degrees on a roof, mapped.
The ideal customer is a large, dark, hot roof. Targeting is reflectance-led: every roof is ranked on measured albedo and area. The cooling-load signals (use, EPC, climate) are a modelled overlay that sharpens that ranking, not a gate that drops roofs. Cold outreach becomes a targeted map.
Total dark roof area is the addressable market. Per building, reflectance, area and the 95% coating give the annual energy, cost and CO₂ avoided, costed against the live grid, with listed and conservation-area buildings flagged so the targetable market is the real one.
The same free satellites revisit every few days, the basis for measuring change over time and verifying impact remotely, building the evidence the mission and its funders need.
An illustrative extrapolation, not a survey. We measured 0.41 km² of dark roof across 12 city centres (11% of the roof area we map, pure-physics reflectance) and scaled to the UK’s ~2,000+ km² of building roof (OS / national land-cover building footprint area) at half the dark-roof share we map in those centres (city centres skew to flat commercial decks, so the national mix is lighter). The solar-heat figure is robust physics, the load a 95% coating bounces back. The ~320 TWh comparison sets absorbed solar heat (thermal TWh) against electricity demand, an illustrative sense of scale, not an energy equivalence. We deliberately do not headline a national £ figure: the cooling bill depends on air-conditioning, which under 5% of UK homes have. Scaling is a question of compute, not data or cost.
We will not oversell it, and that discipline is the point.
Emissiv set out to keep the world cool without warming it. This turns that mission into something you can point at: here is the urban heat, here is the reflective surface we can address, here is the carbon we can take out of cooling, building by building, free to survey, national in reach.
Same physics as the product. Pointed at the whole country. For free.
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