Heading

Solar farm developers use RapidCanvas to identify high quality sites for new solar farm
developments.

Summary
The growth of the world’s capacity to generate electricity from solar panels, wind turbines and
other renewable technologies is on course to accelerate over the coming years, with 2021
expected to set a fresh all-time record for new installations. Typically, solar farms are built to
serve a company or a community and involve a developer who builds the solar farm and
homeowners or local businesses who pay to share the benefits. For a developer, finding the
right site for a solar farm is not always easy. To identify candidate sites, developers have to
consider many different variables such as solar irradiance, available subsidies, and energy
economics.

At RapidCanvas, we have built machine learning models to make the process of finding sites for
solar farm developers automated and more efficient. Working with solar farm developers, we
can build custom models to identify the best available sites for solar farm construction by
generating a rank-ordered list of candidate sites.

Benefits
● Build a robust pipeline of solar development projects by automating process of
identifying qualified sites
● Reduce risk and increase profitability of solar farm ventures by finding the highest value
opportunities
● Create a repeatable process for identifying and pursuing solar development
opportunities
● Reduce costs spent on analysts and land agents

Problem
A Brazilian Company that builds solar farms throughout Brazil has an existing process for
identifying candidate sites to build new solar farms on. Since the information needed to evaluate
each particular site is from multiple disparate sources, the process involves looking up google
earth and property record platforms searching for the ideal site. This wastes hours of time from
engineers and analysts that have to dig through various systems to gather the proper
information used to evaluate site feasibility.
In order to solve this problem, RapidCanvas and the solar farm developers finalized the
following goals:

● Identify and rank the highest quality sites within a given geographical area for solar
development
 ● Filter for sites that meet specific and adjustable qualification criteria
● Continuously update qualification criteria by learning from site development outcomes
● Apply machine learning techniques for site description (topology type, vegetation type
and others)

Solution
RapidCanvas worked with the client to determine key data points and sources for site
identification and evaluation. The solution took inputs including legal information, substation
loads and transmission capacity, GIS data, weather and solar irradiation data, proximity to
connection points and substations, and local financial/energy pricing information. These inputs
are gathered using various sources and techniques, including public APIs, data mining, and
machine learning feature generation. Using the RapidCanvas platform, the team created an
algorithm that generates a ranked list of sites with an opportunity matrix showing the most
promising sites. In a live production setting, the client can update the qualification criteria used
to generate the site list so that the output stays relevant and up to date.

The ranked site list and opportunity matrices are then used by the client to create a pipeline of
qualified site candidates that can be quickly evaluated and pursued.

About RapidCanvas
RapidCanvas provides a no-code platform for data practitioners to go from raw data to ML
model outcome in a matter of days (normally this process takes weeks or months). What
differentiates the platform are algorithms that automate feature engineering (feature engineering
is the process of transforming raw data into attributes that better represent the real world
problem to the ML models). Automating feature engineering reduces the time to value by 80%
and improves model results by at least 15%.