Solar project developers ought to move away from a “throwing spaghetti at the wall” approach when it comes to site selection for new projects.
This is according to Simen Fure Jørgensen, CEO of Norwegian solar mapping software provider Glint Solar, who speaks to PV Tech Premium on the practice of site selection, and how this process has changed in the solar industry. Last week, Glint launched a new ‘land screening’ program that allows users to search for and sort parcels of land in the US based on a number of criteria, including access to grid connections, with plans to expand the program to cover the rest of the US and mainland Europe in time. Jørgensen likens the site selection process using this program to the use of “a giant sieve”.
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“Land screening is basically a giant sieve that makes you able to sift through the whole state and find all the really good nuggets, according to your own criteria,” he tells PV Tech Premium. “As a developer, you have a list of criteria, and you can simply list them all and set up the tool to search.”
He adds that this approach, of selecting a single site based on a series of very specific criteria right at the start of the project development process, is at odds with other methods of site selection, which he says “has been to generate a lot of sites—a bit of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks”.
“[Site selection] might have something to do with grid connections, but it’s just as likely they weren’t aware of every single fact on the ground,” he explains. “You have to think about everything from flood risk to archaeological artefacts to endangered species, access roads, hiking trails [and] a very wide range of topics that you have to be aware of when you’re developing a site.”
Indeed, Jørgensen points to figures from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, published last year, which found that four-fifths of energy projects in the US that had made grid applications withdrew from the “inefficient” grid queue before receiving approval. For Jørgensen, this suggests that developers have had something of a scattershot approach to selecting many sites, in the hope that one will receive approval, rather than picking a site based on the specific needs of the project being considered.
“The 80% number really shows that that has been the practice,” he says. “You’re starting way too many projects that maybe never had a chance to live.”
Performing this kind of site selection, however, requires a depth of data that is not always available to project developers.
“There is a requirement on having some level of data, and the better the data is, either openly available or we can decide from something, say a public application process, that helps,” says Jørgensen. “The openness of data is important for us, but also in general for the rollout of renewables; if this kind of data is shared, it’s not just a commercial advantage for Glint, but an advantage for the rollout.”
He goes on to say that some data can be inferred—such as using government data on curtailment figures to identify regions that could be in greatest need of new battery energy storage systems (BESS)—but it can be challenging to forecast how an area’s power generation or grid capacity will change when projects that are currently under development have their timelines measured in years.
“You have to have information on public works,” says Jørgensen. “These projects aren’t being built tomorrow—they might be being built in 2026 or 2029 or 2030—so you have to know what kind of public works are happening on a substation or the grid lines in an area, between now and the time you’ll most likely connect.”
He adds that his company is currently working on a program that would allow users to search regions by current grid availability, dubbed ‘GlintGrid’, which is in the pilot phase, with testing being completed with “select customers”. However, as with many of the company’s projects, “this requires a lot of digging through data,” and Jørgensen does not provide further details on when this new program could be rolled out.
Beyond the need for more data on potential sites, Jørgensen points to a plethora of challenges that solar developers face at present. Some of these challenges are region-specific—he jokes that, in Germany for instance, “every other month there’s a new set of rules” that developers have to familiarise themselves with—but broader issues like the growth of curtailment and the inability of traditional grid infrastructure to keep up with solar deployment mean the picture is changing for all developers.
“If you’re a solar developer in 2026 you face a lot of challenges,” he says. “The grid part is really top-of-mind, but it’s not as easy as applying and waiting for and getting, or not getting, a grid connection.
“There’s a fundamental problem, that we’re able to produce lots and lots of cheap electricity, but we have a grid that isn’t able to transport it,” he adds, pointing to the example of Germany, where there is over 63GW of operational wind capacity in the country, but the majority of this is located in the north, while electricity demand is higher in the south.
In response, the Germany grid regulator approved the construction of a new 9,600km power line to transfer power from the north to the south earlier this year. However, Jørgensen is one of many people to have suggested that more effective deployment of BESS could be an easier solution to problems like these than large-scale grid infrastructure investments.
“The answer to that is co-location with BESS and BESS deployment,” he says. “It does shift around how you develop sites. A grid connection is still needed, so the problem will cool down a bit, but I think that we need more and more power and need to build out the infrastructure in the end.”
When asked about the idea that all the ‘best’ sites for new solar PV projects have already been selected, and projects built on them, Jørgensen argues that this is not necessarily true.
“That’s a core question across the US and really across the world,” he says. “Developers have been working hard to find new sites, but I don’t think the best sites have been taken. It’s the easiest ones that have been taken.
“It has been a bit of a gold rush—not for gold nuggets, but we’re laying out in the open air—and developers were able to pick the easily accessible ones off the ground,” he continues, returning to the gold rush metaphor to illustrate how more care is needed in site selection these days. “The way it is now is that you have to sift through a lot of sand in the creek to find those nuggets. There might be very good sites that you just haven’t found yet.”
Finding sites that can accommodate solar PV and BESS could be a key component of future project development; Jørgensen says that there is a “clear path” to co-locating these technologies as the requirements of generating projects change in regions where grid infrastructure is weaker.
“We started in solar, and that was all it was about. A few years ago, we added batteries and we’re there; [batteries] are a first-class citizen,” he says, noting that his company’s offerings will have to adapt to the requirements of project developers as they change.
“Some are using solar PV only, some do both, some do BESS only, so we’re already there that it’s a first-class citizen. But then, of course, customers [say] ‘we use your tool for PV and BESS, but we’re also considering hybridising a wind farm,’ so we, of course, move where the customers are,” he adds. “We’re definitely launching support for wind as well, so that will come soon.”
This approach, of being flexible and responding to customer demand, will also affect Glint’s work with regard to rolling out its programs in other regions. Jørgensen said that he plans for the company’s data to cover Europe—but did not disclose where that growth would begin, or over what timeframe—but pointed to a focus on Luxembourg because of the “availability of data” in the country.
“We have a tool that we are focusing on Luxembourg for,” he says. “It’s a random thing about the availability of data, and it’s a small country, so you can do it all.”
Meanwhile, in the US, he says that Glint will roll out its software where there is demand from customers, to meet the demands of the company’s “commercial orientation”.
“We just have to crunch through enormous amounts of data for every single parcel [which] has to be pre-processed, and obviously we have a commercial orientation, so we’ll process where we have leads and customers, and where we think we should have customers.”

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