Pinpointing top counties for renewable energy project development in the Central United States

How a leading renewable energy developer ranked the attractiveness of locations for wind, solar and storage projects.

A leading renewable energy developer needed to identify top-ranking counties for future project development in the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) in advance of an Investment Committee meeting. The SPP market is complex, spanning 14 states and over 600 counties, each with different priorities, regulations, resource availability, demographics, and anticipated demand growth, including from data centers.

The challenge

The developer urgently needed a working model to support its commercial assessment of the highly complex SPP marketplace. The model needed to consolidate disparate data sources from the SPP marketplace, states, counties, utility service territories, and census tracts and convert them into a digestible renewable development attractiveness score. Additionally, the model needed to be effortlessly reconfigurable and be equipped to provide the client with an on-demand heatmap across all SPP counties.

The developer had a short time to build this configurable model from scratch to deliver clear insights into county-level development attractiveness, knowing it would require deep knowledge of the US renewables marketplace, combined with specialist data, database, and model development skills. To meet this challenge, the developer engaged Baringa for their expertise.

The solution 

Together, our teams identified key drivers influencing development attractiveness, as well as pinpointing the right data sources to compare SPP counties against one other. Next, we developed a scoring model to convert the data into actionable insights.

The model converts data points and configurable inputs across multiple factors into rankings and scores per county. The scores for each county show project attractiveness for solar, wind, storage and hybrid projects in a visual heatmap. An additional heatmap aggregates and displays average scoring across all technologies. 

The results

Delivered in just five weeks, the model enabled the developer to re-align their strategy to focus on development in more attractive counties and allocate capital and effort more effectively. The results of the model led to a separate, more detailed analysis, where Baringa further supported the client in identifying the best locations to develop grid-scale batteries, with detailed economics and market value assessment, allowing them to further hone-in on where to deploy capital.