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, the number of titles to negotiate, bushfire and flood exposure, and nearby population. Each criterion is a public dataset. Siting takes months because those datasets come from different agencies in different formats and are not joined.
The join exists here because the same layers are used for 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 a column general mapping tools omit. A 400 hectare candidate across five titles is a different negotiation to the same area in one title, and the cadastre shows the fragmentation before any contact is made. It does not show ownership, which is not a public dataset. Parcel screening runs on the NSW cadastre today.
After a site is chosen
The same stack answers the questions that follow site selection. Who lives inside a five kilometre buffer, and their age and income profile. The existing generation and storage fleet nearby. How the corridor crosses land use and hazard boundaries. Where EV charging and distribution infrastructure sits, for a council readiness assessment.
In the lake now: 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. Not in the lake: environmental referrals and connection queue data. Those are the next additions.
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 reader can tell 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. REZ boundaries come 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 mirrors are licensed for non-commercial use only and that licence would apply to 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 connection and yield studies are spent on candidates that passed the initial 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 from the same ABS spine used elsewhere. That is usually what a consultation or benefit-sharing plan needs first.
Related
Run it on your own portfolio
Zenancy is in private preview with Group 2 reporters and their advisers.
Request access