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.
Energy
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.
Siting a wind, solar or storage project is a multi-criteria elimination. Slope and aspect, distance to transmission, land use, how many titles you would have to negotiate, bushfire and flood exposure, and who lives nearby. Every one of those is a public dataset. The reason siting still takes months is that they are twelve different datasets in eleven different formats, and nobody joined them.
That join already exists here, because the same layers do climate risk and land screening.
The screen
Across the New England and Central-West Orana REZ areas, find parcels over 200 hectares with slope under five degrees, within 10 km of a transmission line, on grazing or cropping land use, outside bushfire prone land.
| Candidate | Area | Mean slope | Line distance | Titles |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C-018 | 412 ha | 2.1° | 3.4 km | 2 |
| C-044 | 287 ha | 3.8° | 6.9 km | 1 |
| C-061 | 233 ha | 4.4° | 9.1 km | 5 |
reztransmissioncadastreterrainland_usehazardsThe candidates above are illustrative, not real parcels. Title count is the column developers tend to care about most and the one general mapping tools leave out. A 400 hectare candidate spread across five separate titles is a different negotiation to the same area in one, and the cadastre shows the fragmentation before you speak to anyone. What it does not show is who owns them — ownership is not a public dataset. Parcel screening runs on the NSW cadastre today.
Context, not just candidates
The same stack answers the questions that arrive after a site is chosen. Who lives inside a five kilometre buffer and what is the age and income profile. What the existing generation and storage fleet nearby looks like. How the corridor crosses land use and hazard boundaries. Where the EV charging and distribution infrastructure sits for a council readiness assessment.
Renewable energy zones, transmission and substation infrastructure, existing energy facilities, EV charging locations, land use (NSW today, with the national grid being loaded), terrain derived from the elevation model, hazard layers and cadastre are all in the lake now. Environmental referrals and connection queue data are not, and are the obvious next additions.
The honest limits
Terrain slope from a national elevation model is a screen, not a geotechnical result. Land use mapping is a classification with its own vintage and resolution, and it will be wrong on individual parcels. Proximity to a transmission line says nothing about whether that line can take your project. Every output names the layer, the vintage and the resolution that produced it, so the person reading it knows which numbers are indicative and which are measured.
Frequently asked
Where does the transmission and REZ data come from?
Network and infrastructure layers come from Geoscience Australia and AEMO published sources, and REZ boundaries from the state schemes that declare them. Generation and capacity series are taken from AEMO and Geoscience Australia rather than third-party mirrors, because several of those mirrors are licensed for non-commercial use only and that licence would follow into your outputs.
Does this replace a grid connection study?
No. Proximity to a line is not capacity on it, and nothing here models host capacity or connection cost. This narrows the search area so that the expensive studies get spent on candidates that survived the cheap filters.
Can it profile the community around a corridor or a site?
Yes. Population, dwellings, socioeconomic indices and land use within a radius or a corridor buffer come off the same ABS spine used elsewhere, which is usually what a consultation or benefit-sharing plan needs first.
Related
See it run on your portfolio
Zenancy is in private preview with Group 2 reporters and their advisers.
Request access