Page 42 - North American Clean Energy September/October 2019 Issue

wind power
Tips for Choosing and Using Land Management and GIS
by Laura Holt
Software
As the federal Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind and Investment Tax Credit (ITC) for solar subside, clean energy companies face increased pressure to boost profitability from their assets. Knowing what you own and managing operations efficiently remains critical to success, whether in wind or solar farm development, commercial operations, or asset management.
Global leaders in renewables harness technology to connect employees with real- time data and a common visual language, in order to simplify land asset management. The following five examples highlight how they make their organizations smarter, using land management and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) software to combine mapping and advanced analytics.
1. Use GIS to make better business decisions
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Leading renewable companies democratize GIS data across their organizations; location-based analytics offer insights impossible to perceive via tabular data alone.
One renewable utility, with more than 500,000 electric customers, depends
on GIS when setting up renewable projects. An acquisition project involves multiple workflows - often running in parallel - from appraisal and survey work, to environmental planning and contract negotiation. Each project has multiple tracts of land, each at a different stage in each workflow. That makes determining overall project status difficult.
Maps solve that challenge. They can show each workflow as a series of color- coded tasks, and allow each tract to display in the color of the last task completed in that workflow. Workflows can be toggled to instantly view where each tract is in the appraisal process, contract negotiation, etc. With map data live-linked to land records data, the company gets real-time project status maps.
2. Leverage the power of an integrated land management and GIS system
Integrating land management and GIS does more than keep maps real-time; it can reduce time setting up new wind farms.
Another renewables company, with over 30 years of experience and 15 GW in development, took the innovative approach of using GIS tax parcel information to create new records in the land system. A simple interface allows users to select tax parcels in the GIS. Users can then choose which tax parcel attributes to import and populate with optional data. Data entry time was reduced by a factor of nine. Now they can load multiple parcels to create new wind farm projects in minutes - complete with polygons, landowner details, and legal descriptions.
3. Maximize insights with more ways to view data
Organizations with hundreds of leases, easements, or power purchase agreements need a land records system that allows for extraction of meaningful data insights without investing in technical staff. At a minimum, land management software should have robust search capabilities to query and return a list of matching records that can export to a spreadsheet, using a command such as “Show me all the wind leases where I have the right to renew.”
Beyond sorted and filtered spreadsheet lists, one of the world’s largest wind power producers, with operations on three continents, uses first tier querying to drive
both canned and custom reports so they can drill down to the data view they want. Dashboards roll up data from all levels of reporting and display it in lists, graphs,