As the race to secure land for energy projects intensifies, one key factor could revolutionize the project development industry and level the playing field among developers: speed.
Currently, securing and permitting land for clean energy initiatives is a slow, tedious, and costly process.
Despite significant efforts in development, less than 20% of these projects manage to connect to the power grid, mainly due to interconnection expenses and local permitting challenges.
New York’s Renewable Energy Challenge
For instance, New York has set an ambitious target to achieve 20 GW of new renewable generation by 2030. This requires an annual deployment of 2.8 GW.
However, in the last five years, New York has only added 2.6 GW to the grid, averaging just 0.5 GW per year.
To meet its goal, the state needs to multiply its current deployment rate by five, a daunting task that is raising concerns about potential delays in meeting the schedule.
To achieve climate, funding, and clean energy objectives, there is an urgent need to expedite processes.
The Clean Energy Land Rush: Scarcity of Viable Options
The demand for clean energy projects is surging, fueled by state and federal targets, corporate climate goals, and the transition to electric vehicles (EVs).
However, each project has specific land requirements that severely limit the number of viable parcels, including factors like space, elevation, topography, and proximity to interconnection infrastructure.
For example, in Glenn County, California, a developer found that out of the county’s vast 1,327 square miles, only 295 acres across five properties were suitable for community solar development.
This scarcity of viable land is not unique to Glenn County; it represents a broader challenge in meeting ambitious renewable energy goals.
This situation is leading to fierce competition among projects, driving up land prices and excluding smaller developers and community-based initiatives.
Larger companies are more likely to succeed because they can allocate extensive resources to the tedious task of locating and securing increasingly scarce land and can outpace their competition.
Creating a level playing field is crucial to fostering innovation and contributions from smaller developers in the renewable energy sector, which in turn could help reduce costs and accelerate the transition to clean energy.
Complex Permitting and Regulatory Hurdles
We conducted an analysis to identify viable land for community solar projects in New York, taking local permitting restrictions into account.
Initially, we located 6,080 parcels of land, each at least 20 acres and within 0.2 miles of a distribution feeder with over 1 MW capacity.
After eliminating parcels with poor buildability scores, the list was narrowed down to 4,901 properties, totaling 201,964 acres.
In theory, this land could support 3,366 MW of solar PV if permitting restrictions were ignored. However, after factoring in explicitly forbidden or uncertain zones, this potential drops to 2,889 MW.
When considering only areas where solar is explicitly allowed or likely to be permitted, the capacity further declines to 909 MW.
This means that to meet New York’s 2030 solar goals, only about one-third of the required capacity can be supported by land that is currently clear for permitting.
Securing land is merely the first hurdle. Our analysis shows that much of the future growth in distributed solar will need to occur in areas with uncertain zoning restrictions—a process that typically requires detailed local policy knowledge and is traditionally analyzed manually by developers, taking months to complete.
Furthermore, areas with the most grid capacity tend to attract developers, often leading to local ordinance changes that are unfavorable for renewable development.
Time is a costly adversary in this scenario, as the legal right to use land for renewables can change rapidly.
Sudden regulatory changes can render land unusable, resulting in expensive project delays or even cancellations.
The longer it takes to navigate regulatory challenges and the multi-layered, unstandardized permitting process, the more costly and risky the project becomes.
Speed as the Equalizer in Clean Energy Development
Technology holds the potential to speed up and simplify the entire process, leveling the playing field in clean energy development and increasing the number of successful projects.
By leveraging automation, software, and detailed data, developers can proactively address potential obstacles, prioritize the most promising locations quickly, and ultimately save time while avoiding costly delays.
Platforms like Paces, which consolidate environmental, geospatial, and proximity grid data along with permit and zoning requirements, enable developers of all sizes to find land that meets their needs in minutes instead of months.
These platforms provide instant insights into land data, permit, and zoning requirements, and they can monitor policy changes in real-time—an essential feature given the unpredictable and often conflicting nature of local and federal policies.
In short, data software and AI-driven innovations empower developers to operate smarter, faster, and on a larger scale, thereby accelerating the growth of renewable energy projects.
Embracing a New Era of Clean Energy Opportunities
Addressing climate change requires the rapid deployment of clean, renewable electricity, but current development timelines are too slow, expensive, and cumbersome.
By adopting data-driven solutions that streamline land acquisition and permitting processes, we can accelerate the rollout of renewable energy projects and secure a cleaner, more sustainable future.