ABEI Energy
Identifying and assessing development sites faster for ABEI Energy’s power production

Background:

End-to-end management of renewable power generation projects

ABEI Energy is an Independent Power Producer (IPP) engaged in the full management of renewable energy projects from development and construction to operation and maintenance. It is actively growing its operations in the UK across multiple renewable capabilities, including photovoltaic, biomass, wind and hydroelectric.

Currently operating in Europe and America, ABEI Energy is committed to helping the UK achieve its zero emissions targets and is constantly on the lookout for new sites to develop. The organisation engaged LandHawk to help it identify potential development sites faster and risk assess against its specific custom criteria. Idox has since acquired LandHawk in 2022 and continues to support ABEI Energy with its in-house team of geospatial experts, having helped design a bespoke solution to meet its needs now and in the future.

Challenge:

Identifying the right development sites without relying on multiple, manual, outdated processes

The growth plans that ABEI Energy has hinge on the identification and development of new renewable infrastructure carried out by its project development team. The process it was using was time-consuming and outdated, involving the use of multiple siloed resources and geospatial expertise to search for and assess opportunities. Its specific criteria of search requirements meant the results were inaccurate and slow to process. It needed a system that allowed for personal data ingestion plus the personalisation of site analysis results.

Solution:

One platform to find and assess potential renewable infrastructure sites

The team at LandHawk quickly identified that its geospatially enabled site identification and viability assessment platform would deliver the customisation capability ABEI Energy required to find and assess potential development sites quickly.

The bespoke nature of the project required a full enterprise service, including a customised solution to meet ABEI Energy’s exact requirements for site searching. ABEI Energy needed to know specific detail, such as impact regarding agricultural land classification and proximity to substations and gridlines. A team of geospatial experts set up custom data ingestion, Distribution Network Operator (DNO) gridline and substation location data. This included a custom site analysis weighting profile to include DNO data with risk scoring to only highlight sites that ABEI Energy deem developable.

A custom nationwide Her Majesty’s Land Registry dataset was also set up, joining all touching land parcels with the same ownership, allowing ABEI Energy to instantly understand marriage opportunities across land ownerships. There are also future plans for fully automated DNO data updates.

Outcome:

Faster delivery of projects with a single, collaborative platform to identify viable opportunities

Now the team at ABEI Energy has a one-stop-shop solution in the platform. It enables them to quickly view planning applications, environmental constraints, run custom searches, analyse results and manage land acquisition opportunities much quicker and more reliably than ever before.

Access to the DNO data is now within the same platform as environmental designations and land parcels, enabling ABEI Energy to view data in context with each other, negating a reliance on GIS and geospatial expertise. With greater collaboration between departments and everything on one platform, project developers can allow the data teams to rapidly identify viable opportunities through the automated search for sites. Manual collation of data is no longer a restraint on project delivery times. Consequently, the platform has helped ABEI Energy remove the time and cost drain associated with previous methods for impact assessment and automated the search process, hugely reducing manual effort expended by geospatial technicians, and bringing it in line with achieving its growth plans and environmental targets.

Rob Morris, Project Developer, ABEI Energy, comments, “Working with LandHawk has been a very smooth process and they’ve really understood our requirements. The custom nature of what we needed to get out of the platform wasn’t readily available elsewhere and the team took the time to understand what we needed. We’re now able to find the right development sites without the need to rely on multiple resources to deliver, allowing us to deliver important projects faster.” Rob Morris, Project Developer,
ABEI Energy.