Land Search for Solar Development: Find the Best Solar Farm Land at Pace & Scale

With confidence running high within the renewable energy sector, we have seen a sharp rise in customers using LandHawk to search, find and acquire land which is suitable for solar development. Our customers can either self-serve through a subscription to the LandHawk Pro software or engage our specialist land sourcing teams for renewable energy projects, whereby we identify suitable land and make initial contact with the landowners on their behalf. This flexible model allows our customers to avoid the expense and risk associated with setting up and managing a specialist in-house team, with LandHawk in effect becoming an extension of their operations.

As with any other sector, the key to land intelligence success is to assemble the right data and ask the right questions of that data. With more than 100 geospatial layers in our platform, and a team of dedicated GIS experts to manage them, this is where LandHawk comes into its own. Using our SiteFinder tool, any of these information layers can be combined to build a single query based on each customer’s land suitability criteria for their particular solar farm development project. In our experience no two customers ever have the exact same criteria, however typical considerations for identifying suitable solar land include:

• Land parcel size. This is determined by the preferred size of the solar farm and the expected output and can vary considerably. LandHawk’s SiteFinder tool allows the parcel size range to be set and automatically irrespective of the parcel size
• Overall site size. For large schemes where single parcels of land are rarely sufficient a land assembly exercise might be necessary. This is where a number of contiguous parcels are brought together to form a single site
• Not within certain designate areas for example National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Special Protection Areas and Special Areas of Conservation among many others
• Not within a flood zone, in particular flood zone 3. Flood zones 1 & 2 might be viable but this varies depending on each customer’s approach to mitigation
• Proximity to NGET OHLs and substations. Again, the precise distances vary depending on the type and size of scheme. LandHawk allows the user to draw the required radius 
• Distance from a DNO OHL or substation 
• Existing land usage
• Slope aspect and gradient
• Storage

We work closely with every customer to ensure that the appropriate criteria and data have been defined prior to commencement of any land searches. Where additional datasets are required we will do our best to source them. Similarly, if you would like to add your own data as rules within the suitability parameters we will create an ingestion plan together. Key datasets already in the platform as standard include: DNO and National Grid substations; overhead lines; pylons; National Grid underground cable network; AONB; Green Belt; SSSI, Agricultural Land Classifications; Flood Risk; and Conservation Areas among many others.

As an additional exercise, we are often asked to identify the optimal cable route from the proposed development site to the expected point of connection. In this instance ‘optimal’ can mean different things to different people but, as with our approach in general, we will always take the time to define this with our customers.