Is Renewable Doable? Continued from page 21 The atlas features agricultural soils suitable for growing oilseed crops, like these sunflowers at John Williamson's State Line Farm. State Line Biofuels is Vermont's first on-farm facility making biodiesel made from oilseed crops grown on-site. With on-farm energy production, Vermont farmers can develop new value-added revenue sources (e.g., organic, local livestock meal), reduce on-farm expenditures and greenhouse gas emissions, ensure their energy security, and circulate money locally. model, and analyze the GIS data necessary for the project. "The overall objective was to build intelligence into the modeling process for each renewable energy layer that reflects the best overall public good for each resource site," he said. "Datasets for the major renewable energy options—biomass, efficiency, geothermal, hydroelectric, solar, and wind—were further broken down into multiple categories of data for specific renewable energy analysis. For example, the biomass option includes data for biodiesel, perennial grasses (i.e., grass pellets), methane digesters, waste to energy, and woody biomass." VCGI worked with a wide range of experts in Vermont to identify and modify existing datasets, model new ones, and develop a methodology for each energy layer. Once developed, these layers were further processed through a suitability framework that balanced the raw renewable energy resource with a myriad of practical considerations relating to conservation, ecology, natural resources, and recreational activities. This framework screens out areas, such as rare and threatened species habitat or areas abutting rivers, lakes, and wetlands, that are unsuitable for develop- ment. It assigns rankings or relative suitability values to the remaining areas. These values can reflect the volume or quality of the raw resource, as well as societal values relating to a specific natural resource. To build functionality for the atlas, VSJF contracted with Fountains Spatial, a leading provider of GIS services such as application architecture design and development, data design, training, and hosting. Fountains Spatial designed a leading-edge service-oriented ArcGIS Server-based architecture that included ArcGIS Online 22 ArcUser Fall 2010 www.esri.com