Project Title: Smart Power Maps
Funding Opportunity: SunShot Technology to Market (Incubator 10)
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: Austin, TX
Amount Awarded: $773,500
Awardee Cost Share: $773,500
Project Investigator: Clay Butler

GeoCF’s Smart Power Maps solution is a comprehensive software platform for utility-scale solar project evaluation and development. Smart Power Maps gives solar developers, utilities, and investors the ability to bring large-scale solar projects to market faster with lower cost of capital. Users can comprehensively evaluate tens of thousands of potential projects simultaneously and manage project development for the best sites through all stages of development.

Approach

This project will further develop the Smart Power Maps software and expand commercialization of the product. It will also expand the data sets used and automate transmission capacity analysis in the current tool to accelerate the interconnection process. This ability to automate and optimize the full lifecycle of a utility-scale project from siting, development, design, and finance to interconnection supports the goal to accelerate the adoption of solar through cost reduction throughout the solar value chain, including balance of system costs.

Innovation

By streamlining and combining the financial modeling and geographic constraints analysis steps of the due-diligence process, the Smart Power Maps tool cuts weeks from project timelines for initial screening and can reduce project development costs significantly. GeoCF is also building a mapping and report portal for project investors and financiers, allowing them to instantaneously run cash flow models and full constraint feasibility analysis on utility scale projects, including everything from property tax liabilities, geotech, hydrology, transmission constraints, wholesale clearing price backcasts and forecasts, endangered species, topographic restraints, and more.