Buildable Area & Constraint Analysis

Challenge

The client needed to screen 50 potential sites across three counties for a 100 MW solar farm. Their team was spending 8 hours per site manually checking zoning codes, pulling flood maps, researching wetlands, calculating slopes, and tracking down utility information. That's 400 hours of analyst time at $40,000 in labor costs. Worse, different team members were getting different answers because they were using different data sources. The confusion delayed their interconnection application by six weeks, which put the entire project timeline at risk.

Our Solution

We built them a constraint analysis system that does all the research automatically. We gathered every rule that mattered across all three counties (60 different requirements), connected to all the public data sources they needed (FEMA for floods, USFWS for wetlands, USGS for slopes, county GIS for zoning), and set up an automated workflow. Now they upload a site boundary, and 12 minutes later they get back a clear map showing exactly where they can build, how many acres are usable, and which specific rules are creating problems. They reviewed all 50 sites in two days, immediately ruled out 35 that wouldn't work, and focused their design time on the 15 best candidates.

Results Achieved