May 27, 2021 | Multiple Authors |
December 3, 2024
Construction has kicked off in New Mexico and Arizona on the largest wind energy project in the Western Hemisphere. Pattern Energy’s $11 billion SunZia will provide 3,000 megawatts of clean energy from 916 turbines. Its 550-mile transmission line will carry enough power for 3 million Americans when it comes online in 2026.
“The shape of power makes a good match between the source of power in New Mexico and the market across the Southwest,” said David Janssen, project director, engineering and construction at Pattern Energy. “As the sun goes down in California and Arizona and the solar panels are going offline, the wind is picking up in New Mexico.”
The size and complexity of the project required a new approach—one that involved drones, volumes of data, and a shared mapping solution to manage all phases of the project.
Pattern Energy’s specialists who designed and administer SunZia have been using geographic information system (GIS) technology at an enterprise scale from the start. Teams from all locations use a solution called Maps to Megawatts. Developed by Esri partner Aegean Energy Group, the SunZia Maps to Megawatts ArcGIS Online instance is administered in collaboration with the Pattern Energy Geospatial Technologies team and utilized to create applications to support environmental impact assessments, site selection, transmission routing, and construction.
The solution aggregates data in dashboards to track progress and helps coordinate the many project phases. “We have dashboards tracking construction progress, showing captured drone imagery in relation to the design, and dashboards we’ve shared with the Bureau of Land Management [BLM] that track environmental information,” said Michelle Pruse, director of geospatial technologies at Pattern Energy. “We also have various applications that tracked our land acquisition progress and visualized specific constraints on individual parcels.”
The SunZia Wind and Transmission project began more than a decade ago with the mapping of land parcels. The real estate team recorded details about ownership, land use, water rights, utilities, geology, and more. Then surveyors added precise locations.
To find the best wind pad sites and transmission path, the land was analyzed for terrain, protected habitat, fragile environments, and proximity to homes. Mapping cultural heritage sites of Indigenous tribes was also of paramount importance. GIS helped planners consider all these sensitivities and calculate costs to find the optimal sites and corridors.
While the wind project stretches across counties and the transmission corridor spans two states, the area under analysis was much larger. “When you kickoff a project you think you have a ton of available land, but then you start overlaying all of your constraints,” Pruse said. “It’s a little eye opening to go from a giant slice of the state down to what you can actually use.”
The project’s success depends heavily on cooperation and coordination with government agencies, Tribal Nations, and private landowners. GIS helped facilitate communication. Detailed maps guided conversations and deliberations before Pattern Energy could obtain the necessary permits to proceed.
To achieve route approval, GIS was used to create environmental impact statements required by the National Environmental Policy Act. “Our environmental teams worked closely with BLM to make sure that we have all of the information that we need in GIS in order to analyze those areas and make sure that we’re not encroaching on anything we shouldn’t,” Pruse said.
Because the line goes through a national wildlife refuge, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is also a stakeholder.
“Having all of these different types of landowners isn’t typical,” Janssen said. “GIS helps us identify the specific needs of each landowner and have a common approach that crews in the field can navigate and understand.”
After the site locations were solidified, the design and permitting teams worked to match their plans with the constraints at each site. Engineers improved the designs for both the wind and transmission towers. They recorded details for each tower’s unique foundation and made plans for earthmoving to allow stormwater drainage or establish access roads.
The Maps to Megawatts solution captured details of all the 2,100 transmission tower structures along the line, each with a custom design.
The transmission line project will employ more than 1,000 construction workers, split into three teams and deployed across different sections of the route.
Now that the project has reached the construction phase, work crews have embraced GIS-powered apps to navigate and document the work. Each tower has specific access requirements. For instance, some can only be reached by helicopter.
“Being able to visualize work areas, and look at access routes and constraints, allows us to be more efficient,” Janssen said. “It beats getting everyone in a truck to drive out to do a review, and then looking at pages and pages of drawings to sort it all out.”
More than 50 inspectors review construction to ensure that all parts of the project align with environmental and operational standards.
Drones and on-the-ground observations from crews capture every move to manage risks and ensure careful environmental compliance.
“GIS influences what everyone is doing in the field,” Janssen said. “About a tenth of the crew are using a tablet, phone, or laptop to make observations, take photos, create production reports, or look up data. When someone finds something that’s helpful for them, they can share that with the rest of the group.”
In just the first three months of construction, more than 13,000 observations had been made along the route.
With millions of dollars being spent on construction each day, the cost of delays compound quickly. Whenever something stands in the way, drones and the data in the GIS solution help the team plan around it.
Drone imagery, captured and processed using Site Scan for ArcGIS, helps the crews look ahead to see whether fences and roads are in good condition or in need of repairs.
Inside GIS, the imagery is used to evaluate changing conditions, such as the effects of monsoon rains. It also helps track movements of material, including calculating the amount of earth that has been moved to flatten the terrain.
Some of the tower sites are still under review, which Janssen said causes concern about construction delays. “GIS has allowed us to analyze those areas and come up with workarounds and resequencing to keep our crews engaged and not just sitting at a locked gate waiting for someone to open it,” he said.
Drone images also enable real-time collaboration between the field and the office. “If we’ve got a problem that comes up, we can all look at the drone data to talk about it intelligently,” Janssen said.
One BLM permit requirement called for the relocation of all cactus and endangered plants, and drone imagery eased the effort.
“We’ve got people on the ground tagging and identifying saguaro and other cacti, then crews go pick them up and move them out of our right-of-way,” Janssen said. “By looking at the imagery before and after, we can see which cacti make it through the move and which might need some help.”
The careful collection of construction data, and an accurate record of what was on the land before construction started, will also support the ownership and operation of SunZia.
A before record, captured by drones, helps answer questions. “We’ve taken a photo of every single crack that looked like it was susceptible to any kind of damage during construction,” Janssen said. “That crack may come back to be a big deal 10 years down the road.”
GIS records of project construction will be useful for at least the next 20 years, guiding the operations team in its upkeep of wind turbines, and transmission lines and stations.
Part of Janssen’s job is to hand over the project to operations. “Having the common GIS platform makes that job so much easier for us,” he said. “We have the data already assembled, and the construction observations packaged up. This helps the operations team digest it and get up to speed on the project.”
Well before construction started, Pattern Energy’s SunZia project had been praised for its many benefits. These include creating good paying jobs, lowering energy costs, stopping power outages in the face of extreme weather, and accelerating the transition to clean energy.
However, it took 15 years for the utility-scale energy project to finalize all the necessary approvals.
“What gets the most attention in the industry seems to be the length of time it’s taken to bring this to market,” Janssen said.
The many agencies involved in the project in different jurisdictions had a lot to do with the long delay. But other clean energy projects have also faced long development timelines, which has led to calls for reform and bipartisan legislation to modernize the permit process.
From Pattern Energy’s perspective, the documentation of end-to-end workflows could speed future permitting and construction processes. If regulators embraced technology and used a GIS-powered digital twin for approvals and oversight, inspections could happen remotely with online approvals. This level of modernization would be in line with a growing local government trend to electronically process permits and enforce requirements via online tools.
“We are hoping some of the lessons we’ve learned during permitting and construction—collaborating with GIS—can help us streamline the environmental review process so we can be more efficient,” Janssen said.
Learn more about how renewable energy projects benefit from GIS.
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