Scaling environmental monitoring across energy infrastructure

Background

A major energy infrastructure company operates an extensive portfolio of renewable energy installations and transmission corridors across the United States. With growing regulatory pressure from bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and increasing stakeholder expectations around environmental stewardship, the company sought to enhance its sustainability reporting and demonstrate the environmental value of responsible land management.

Quantifying environmental impact across vast infrastructure networks

Energy companies face unique challenges in measuring and managing the environmental value of their land portfolios:

• Regulatory compliance demands: Growing requirements for biodiversity reporting and environmental impact assessments from regulatory bodies create pressure to demonstrate measurable environmental outcomes across thousands of acres.
• Infrastructure risk exposure: Vast land holdings and rights-of-way face unquantified nature-related risks including land degradation, extreme weather events, and ecosystem decline that threaten operational stability and grid resilience.
• Data and measurement gaps: Traditional on-ground surveys and manual data collection across dispersed solar installations and transmission corridors are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming, often costing hundreds of thousands of dollars while providing only point-in-time snapshots.
• Scaling challenges: With portfolios spanning hundreds of acres across multiple sites, energy companies lack cost-effective methodologies to consistently measure biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem health at scale.
• Demonstrating co-benefits: Without quantifiable data, companies struggle to validate the environmental co-benefits of their land management practices or position themselves as leaders in sustainable infrastructure development.

Platform-based ecosystem measurement for energy infrastructure

The Landbanking Group deployed its Landler platform to provide scalable, science-backed monitoring across the company's pilot portfolio of ten solar power sites (133 acres) and two transmission corridors (87 acres):‍

• AI-powered monitoring and verification: Using satellite data combined with machine learning models validated by partners including ETH Zurich, Oxford ECI, and Stanford University, the platform delivers plot-level nature metrics across biodiversity, water, and carbon dimensions.
• Natural Capital Account dashboard: A centralized digital interface consolidates analysis from multiple projects, enabling the organization to track natural capital development pixel by pixel and scale monitoring efforts efficiently.
• Comprehensive climate risk assessment: Analysis leveraging multiple IPCC climate models and emissions scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) to assess physical climate risks including extreme precipitation, temperature fluctuations, heat waves, drought, floods, and strong wind events at 12-25km resolution.
• Ground-truthed biodiversity insights: Deployment of bioacoustic monitoring equipment to establish biodiversity baselines, track bird species composition and diversity patterns, and enable long-term automated species detection.
• Multi-dimensional indicators: Continuous monitoring of soil organic carbon stocks, water holding capacity, soil moisture, potential old-growth habitat presence, and flora/fauna species occurrences within a 30km radius.

Data-driven environmental stewardship across energy infrastructure

The pilot program delivered measurable insights that positioned the company to meet regulatory requirements while demonstrating environmental leadership:

• Site-level environmental visibility: The company gained precise, location-specific data on biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem health across both solar installations and transmission corridors, enabling targeted land management strategies.
• Regulatory compliance foundation: The monitoring methodology and resulting data provide a robust framework for meeting growing EPA biodiversity requirements and other environmental reporting standards, with potential for cost-effective rollout to additional US and UK locations.
• Infrastructure risk management: Climate risk analysis identified site-specific vulnerabilities to extreme weather and ecosystem degradation, supporting proactive measures to protect critical grid assets and rights-of-way.
• Scalable blueprint for the sector: The project established a replicable methodology for integrating energy infrastructure with responsible land management, positioning the company at the forefront of innovation in the energy utility sector.
• Enhanced stakeholder value: With quantifiable environmental data, the company can now demonstrate the tangible value of its land stewardship efforts to regulators, investors, insurance providers, and communities.