A GIS Team Embraces Automation to Speed Up Site Selection

In almost every industry, a version of the same problem exists: An organization needs to find the best opportunities from a universe of options—sites, markets, territories, customers—faster than competitors, without incurring additional costs. At Minneapolis-based US Solar, the problem takes a specific form. Sunlight isn’t exactly a hidden commodity—but land suitable for solar energy production can be.

To find the best sites, US Solar relies on a sophisticated blend of mapping and analytics from geographic information system (GIS) technology, which layers and analyzes data through the lens of location to reveal patterns invisible in spreadsheets and databases.

“What GIS has allowed us to do is get laser focused,” says Reed Richerson, president of US Solar. “It’s not just site selection—it’s how to rank opportunities, how to visually represent the electrical system and its constraints, while considering other factors like overlaying permitting challenges.”

For Richerson, GIS is a competitive advantage. “It’s a huge part of our success and our ability to prepare for market entry and get really good real estate positions for developing solar and energy storage,” he says.

US Solar has won over communities and clients like the City of Rockport, Illinois; Wells Fargo; the University of Minnesota; and the Minnesota Twins with a simple pitch: Community solar garden subscribers reap the benefits of clean energy without the hassle of installing or operating panels on their own property.

To deliver those benefits, US Solar must find land with the right mix of attributes—the right topography, the right proximity to substations, and enough land to accommodate solar panel construction, among other factors. The more efficiently the company can identify promising opportunities among thousands of potential sites, the quicker its developers can get projects online, growing the business and serving more customers.

A suite of tools built with GIS technology has largely automated that work. The result: the company has doubled the number of properties it evaluates without growing head count.

US Solar Automates a National Site Selection Puzzle

Location software is a hidden force behind many businesses that build resilient, reliable energy infrastructure. Wind, solar, petroleum, and geothermal firms use GIS to accelerate site selection and ensure profitable investments in wells, turbines, and panels.

When Nicholas Rolstad joined the company eight years ago as an intern, he recognized that the company’s site selection would demand more than a point solution. It required an enterprise GIS that could integrate data from other systems and scale with the company’s growth. He set a challenge for himself and his colleagues: “Let’s get our data and system rock-solid, and then we can build almost anything we need to off of this.”

Today Rolstad is VP of enterprise data and director of GIS and site selection, leading a GIS team that’s become an engine for productivity.

In US Solar’s early days, Rolstad used Google Earth to manually trace power stations to power lines and then to neighborhoods, a cumbersome way of looking for communities the company might serve. Many solar companies at that time still relied on plat books, paper maps, and phone books to conduct site searches. Modern GIS software offered something different: a way to digitize and share location data across departments, speeding time to insight.

“We decided early on that [GIS] was something we needed to embrace,” says Richerson, a 20-year veteran of the solar industry.

One of Rolstad’s first moves was to create a GIS application that replaced hard copy maps. The app was a boon to US Solar’s project developers, who scout opportunities to build new solar projects. During a phone call with a landowner, a developer can type in the owner’s name and, through an integration between GIS and CRM, immediately see a map and satellite image of the property. The developer can even annotate the map in real time on-screen.

Another early win was a tool that scrapes parcel data, including geographic boundaries, acreage, and land usage. Automating that process meant teams could quickly whittle 40,000 potential parcels down to the 200 strongest options.

The increased productivity and time savings generated by these tools inspired the company to automate not just pieces of the site selection process but nearly the entire exercise.

From 40,000 Parcels to the 200 That Matter

The business outcome of US Solar’s automated site selection: Developers bypass weeks of manual filtering to work directly with high-probability opportunities. The mapping and analytics system is what makes that possible.

A developer enters the state and county of interest and specifies factors like the minimum size of a parcel and desired distance from power substations. The tool creates areas of interest based on criteria like access to electric distribution lines capable of supplying enough power—sites farther than three miles from a substation often don’t qualify, since they typically don’t deliver strong enough ROI. The GIS-powered tool then eliminates areas with undesirable characteristics—leaving land that is potentially buildable. Scripts clean landowners’ contact data and identify which parcels might be owned by the same person or group.

In the final stages, the tool generates custom maps of the parcels US Solar could build on, which the company sends with leasing proposals to landowners. If a landowner calls for more information, the project developer can quickly access the information and context gathered during the site selection analysis.

“There’s a lot less work for the project developers to be handling,” Rolstad says. “They can just jump straight to the people who are interested in working with us versus trying to do the whole site selection process themselves.”

“The major efficiencies gained have been in the ease with which we can run our site selection models and how fast we can turn around these requests,” he adds.

An Engine for Business Acceleration

A GIS implementation that initially focused on site selection is now an enterprise system that also tracks business performance across the organization.

Management teams use dashboards to gain a macro picture of markets. They can see areas where deals have been signed and track response rates to mailers through a CRM integration. That location intelligence is instrumental in monitoring key performance indicators.

Rolstad and team are also expanding the use of GIS into later stages of development, as well as operations. A construction analysis tool helps managers judge the footprint and cost-effectiveness of projects. An integration between CAD drawings and GIS allows managers to pull up web maps that show progress on projects. Maps identifying zones that qualify for IRA tax credits highlight potential ROI early in the decision-making cycle.

While other companies rely on outside consultants and third-party vendors to provide location analytics, US Solar prefers to keep GIS capabilities in house—quickly standing up tools that make the business run more efficiently, without the cost or lag of external engagements.

For Richerson, that in-house capability is inseparable from US Solar’s competitive position. “It’s a huge part of our success,” he says—”not just in finding land, but in knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing before anyone else does.”