The platform, which will be used by energy companies to determine solar power generation potential at any location, employs highly refined algorithms to model every meter of entire cities, counties, states, countries, and continents for rooftop and ground-based energy production opportunities.
"We believe this platform can support the rapid expansion of the solar power industry by automating site selection, engineering, design, financing and marketing functions across diverse urban and rural environments," said Matt Cheney, CEO of Clean Path Ventures (www.cleanpathventures.com), which provides technical and financial resources to large-scale renewable energy projects. "Geostellar can help energy producers, government officials, and others make effective decisions to increase profitability, strengthen their local economies and protect the environment."
Geostellar is currently piloting the platform with select solar power developers, public administrators, property owners, and utilities in the Midwest, Mid Atlantic and Southwest United States, with additional resources, regions, and applications to be launched in rapid succession.
The high-resolution energy data is delivered through standard Web services and interfaces, Google Earth, mobile devices and a full-featured Geographic Information System (GIS), making the right data and features available for a variety of applications in engineering, project development and finance.
"We believe ‘Earth intelligence' is the human genome project of the new millennium," said David Levine, Geostellar's CEO. "As bioinformatics enabled biotech, big-data geomatics will support innovation in clean tech. Our integrated platform for production modeling, site search, project development, production, operations and trading will support a diverse base of industry stakeholders in identifying the fastest, most profitable and least-risky means of increasing our clean, green, and renewable energy supply."
The platform derives and processes data including incidental solar radiation, digital surface maps, tax parcel boundaries and assessed values, transmission lines and substations, critical habitat, flood plains, zoning, temperature and precipitation – all of the structural and financial assets needed to understand resource availability, access to markets, local marginal pricing, and regulatory factors that influence the success of energy production efforts. Geostellar applies advanced 3D animation techniques such as ray-tracing satellite-derived solar potential values over digital surface maps to precisely determine power output based on the slope of rooftops and terrain, and shadows from trees, structures and geological formations for a complete map of entire continents at a resolution below one square meter per pixel.
Development of the Geostellar platform was funded by clean tech industry investors and the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania (BFTP/NEP) Alternative Energy Development Program.
