Solar Farm Site Selection with National Land Realty
Today there are over half a million solar installations operating in the United States and experts agree that this industry is ripe for continued growth and innovation. But what happens when a high-tech industry collides with the historically low-tech relationship driven real estate industry? Solar providers know the technology and financial part of the equation to continue to change the face of renewable energy, but in many cases, they are slowed down by the real estate process of qualifying sites and negotiating property leases.
Solar companies ran into such a problem several years ago when they set out to grow their solar facility networks on the East Coast. For a site to qualify for a solar facility, more than a dozen separate location-based criteria must be analyzed and scored. The property owner for a potential site would also have to be contacted to see if they were interested in leasing or selling the land. The problem was that many properties were available for lease or sale but did not qualify for solar. Then for the sites that did fully qualify for solar only a small percentage of owners were interested in leasing or selling their property. These solar companies and the rural real estate brokerage business discovered that they had a location analytics problem and National Land Realty set out to solve it.
In early 2014, National Land Realty, working with several solar energy companies, started a pilot project with Beitz and Daigh Geographics to find a solution. With North Carolina as a testing ground, the solution was developed over several months and entailed using a combination of GIS and data driven processes that rank parcel sites based into the categories of Prequalified, Qualified, and Not Qualified status. Dean Sinatra, COO of National Land Realty at the time, lead the charge to create a data driven process for efficiently finding qualified sites, contacting the owners, and tracking the data for each potential deal. With millions of land parcels across the United States he knew that a single county or state solution would not work. They needed a highly scalable multi-user analysis and data collection platform; combined with a process for shifting through all the location data. Early on they could tell that a solar companies’ detailed property analysis would not be needed unless they had an interested land owner, but they did not want to work with the land owners until they thought the land might be suitable for a solar farm development, thus the genesis of a “Prequalified” site. Figure 9.1 shows National Land Realty’s Solar Site Selection Platform which is used to prequalify sites for solar farm developments.
Figure 9.1 National Land Realty’s Solar Site Selection Platform
To prequalify sites, analysts examine parcels on a county by county basis. The parcels were then prequalified on two basic criteria: Is the site within an acceptable distance of the required electric facility infrastructure? And are there environmental issues that would impede development? If positive results were found for these criteria, then the site would be marked in the database as prequalified. Then letters would be sent out to owners of prequalified sites. If the owner responds and is interested in leasing or selling, then the full qualification analysis would proceed with all the results recorded in the database. Beitz and Daigh Geographics, the GIS consultants for National Land Realty, set out to create a platform to aid in the Prequalification and Qualification process. The initial solution began with ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Desktop with layers of data from both Esri and other third-party data sources. The pilot project showed good results with properties being qualified and leases being signed.
As the project looked to scale beyond a single state, Beitz and Daigh migrated the platform from Esri ArcGIS Online to an Esri ArcGIS Server solution hosted originally on the Microsoft Azure cloud and later moved to Amazon Web Services. A customized multi-user mapping application was developed which allowed analysts to prequalify and qualify sites from a web browser or mobile device. Additionally, new functionality was included that allowed analysts to export kmz files which are required for the leasing process, slope and elevation analysis, and parcel searching. Since the application is multi-user with information stored in a central database, “data silos” are minimized and the chances of redundant analysis on a given parcel are eliminated.
Many sites are now prequalified each month resulting in a significant conversion rate to signed leases. Location analytics combined with a real estate workflow is helping to solve this location analytics problem and will help bring solar energy to a grid near you soon.