Renewable energy siting
Multi-criteria siting for wind, solar and storage across Australia — renewable energy zones, transmission proximity, terrain, land use, hazards and title fragmentation in one screen.
Industries
Renewable energy developers
For siting and land access teams — renewable energy zones, transmission proximity, terrain, land use, hazards and title fragmentation in one screen, plus the community profile for consultation.
The siting problem is not conceptually hard. Flat enough land, near enough to a line, on land use that will not fight you, outside the worst hazard areas, in few enough titles to negotiate. The reason it consumes months of analyst time is that those six criteria live in six agencies, in six formats, on six different geographies.
Every one of those layers is already in the lake, because they are the same layers that answer climate and land questions. Siting is a different set of filters over the same join.
Screening
Inside the declared renewable energy zones in NSW, find parcels over 150 hectares with mean slope under five degrees, within 10 km of transmission, on grazing or cropping land, outside bushfire prone land, and count the titles in each.
| Candidate | Area | Mean slope | Line distance | Titles | Land use |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| C-007 | 380 ha | 1.9° | 2.6 km | 1 | Grazing |
| C-023 | 212 ha | 3.1° | 7.8 km | 3 | Cropping |
| C-039 | 164 ha | 4.6° | 9.4 km | 6 | Grazing |
reztransmissioncadastreterrainland_usehazardsThe candidates above are illustrative, not real parcels. Title count is the column that changes a land access strategy and the one general mapping tools leave out. Four hundred hectares in one title and four hundred spread across six are different projects, and the cadastre shows the fragmentation before anyone makes a phone call. It does not show who the owners are — ownership is not a public dataset — and parcel screening runs on the NSW cadastre today.
Land access and consultation
Once a corridor or a site is chosen, the questions change shape. Who lives within five kilometres and what is their age and income profile. How many dwellings sit inside the visual catchment. What the existing generation, storage and charging infrastructure nearby looks like. Which council areas the corridor crosses and what their population trend is.
Those all run off the ABS spine, which means a community profile for a consultation submission is a query rather than a research project. Councils hosting a zone and community energy groups ask the same questions from the other side, and get the same answers from the same layers.
Coverage and limits
Renewable energy zones, transmission and substation infrastructure, existing energy facilities, EV charging points, land use (NSW today, national loading), terrain from the national elevation model, hazard layers and cadastre are all live. Environmental referral history and connection queue data are not, and are the next obvious additions.
Two limits worth stating plainly. Slope from a national elevation model is a screen, not a geotechnical survey, and it will be wrong on individual parcels. Land use classification carries its own vintage and resolution, and a paddock that changed use since the mapping run will be classified as what it was. Both are fine for eliminating candidates and neither is fine as the basis for an investment decision on a single site, which is why every output names the layer and vintage behind it.
Frequently asked
Does this tell us where there is grid capacity?
No, and be wary of anything that claims to. Distance to a line is not capacity on it. What this does is cut a search area down to candidates that survive slope, land use, hazard, area and title tests, so the connection and yield studies get spent on a short list.
Where do the energy layers come from?
Geoscience Australia and AEMO published sources for network and facility data, and the declaring state schemes for renewable energy zone boundaries. Some widely used generation datasets are licensed for non-commercial use only, and those are deliberately not in the lake because the licence would follow into your outputs.
Can it profile the community around a project?
Yes. Population, dwellings, age and income profile, socioeconomic index and land use within a buffer or corridor come off the same ABS spine as everything else. That is usually the first thing a consultation or benefit-sharing plan needs and the last thing anyone can find.
Related
See it run on your portfolio
Zenancy is in private preview with Group 2 reporters and their advisers.
Request access