The Problem

Renewable energy suppliers are in a race to efficiently and accurately identify viable solar sites around the world. Often, the best sites are already taken and developed – the remaining sites are often riddled with risk potential that needs to be carefully assessed before investing precious time and resources.

In this competitive renewable screening landscape, a leading renewable supplier came to Teren with a backlog of dozens of sites that needed to be accurately screened and processed for environmental risk potential—particularly flooding. While their internal GIS team could do initial screening of the sites in ArcGIS, they were unable to process them, and were lacking critical hydrology modeling and analytics. 

The Solution

Requiring specific earth-science intelligence for this task, instead of hiring an cost-heavy Earth Scientist Consultant, the company’s GIS team partnered with Teren. 

Utilizing Teren’s Hydrology and Vegetation Data Suites, the GIS team was able to screen and process their backlog of areas-of-interest (AOIs) for environmental threats based on publicly-available data, empowering them to prioritize projects at a fraction of the time and cost.

Favorite Teren Data Suites: Hydrology & Vegetation

This GIS team especially valued Teren’s comprehensive data on flood risks and site-specific topography, which were critical for making informed decisions early on. Hydrographic and flooding risk datasets included results of flooding extents and depths, flow paths and velocity attribution. It also screened for 100-year flooding, allowing the team to identify potential hazards before committing resources.

Teren’s extensive geospatial data libraries and parallelized cloud processing platform facilitated the automation of the flooding and environmental risk workflows that could be conducted at scale with rapid and efficient turnaround and minimizing manual quality control.

Results

Since starting to use Teren’s Hydrology & Vegetation Data Suites back in May 2024, the company has screened and processed 30+ AOIs that were otherwise laying dormant in their backlog. Meanwhile, the combination of not having to hire an Earth Scientist and using publicly available data (instead of needing to fly and capture each AOI) allowed for beneficial net savings in the process.

Ready to scale and save resources on solar site pre-screening? Contact us.