Case Study
How EDF Power Solutions identified its strongest data center co-location sites across 90+ assets with Paces
EDF Power Solutions
Background:
EDF Power Solutions is a developer, owner, and operator of renewable energy projects across North America. The company has developed 26 GW in North America, manages 17 GW of service contracts and has a 50+ GW pipeline.
Unique approach:
After transmission constraints began eroding returns at several Texas wind projects, EDF pivoted to bringing flexible loads directly to their generation sites rather than waiting on transmission upgrades. Early co-location agreements, including one with Soluna at their Los Majadas wind project in South Texas, validated the model and led to the creation of a dedicated Data Center Solutions team focused on developing energy parks where generation and large flexible loads are built together.
The challenge:
EDF's Data Center Solutions team had a clear mandate: identify which of their 90+ sites were worth pursuing for co-location and bring the strongest sites to market. That meant evaluating assets against criteria they hadn't used before, and not losing their team’s time on site analysis, when they could work on other parts of the project. A few obstacles made that harder than expected:
- Their internal GIS platform wasn't built for co-location: EDF had strong mapping tools designed for standalone energy development, but they lacked the layers that data center developers rely on, like fiber access, proximity to population centers over 50,000, and firm gas pipeline transport. Building a solution internally would take over a year.
- Didn’t want to flood the market with sites: Presenting every site in their 90+ site portfolio without a clear ranking would have overwhelmed any partner conversation. EDF needed to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each asset and to identify a focused set of tier-one sites from their pipeline before engaging the market.
- The opportunity cost of internal analysis was too high: Triaging and organizing 90+ sites internally would have pulled the team away from other core work: partner conversations, site diligence, and deal structuring. Every week spent building spreadsheets was a week not spent going to market.
The solution
EDF engaged Paces Development Services team to triage their pipeline of sites. Rather than delivering a static report, Paces worked through 90+ sites using its platform to score each against data center-specific criteria, and return a ranked, tiered view of the full pipeline in weeks:
- Site scoring built for data center criteria: Paces scored each site across siting, infrastructure, policy, and regulatory factors on a five-point scale. EDF could immediately see which were tier one candidates and needed immediate further de-risking, and which to hold for a later use.
- A living platform, with updated data: Traditional consultants would have delivered a report with static data. Paces’ platform with living data and the insights shared gave EDF access to a dynamic analysis. As Hoegler put it, "a consulting review is stale in time, whereas a software solution can evolve."
- A new lens for talking to data center partners: Working with Paces gave EDF's team more than a ranked list. As Hoegler shared, EDF is "not a powered land developer” traditionally, and Paces gave them the insight they needed to confidently pursue a new market.
"We didn't want to bring 90 sites to market, that's going to overwhelm any partner who would want to co-develop with us. We really wanted to focus on a handful of sites we had spent time diligencing."
— Peter Hoegler, Sr. Manager, Data Center Solutions
The impact of Paces on EDF's go-to-market readiness was immediate:
A prioritized pipeline, ready for the market
EDF's tier one sites are now ready for active co-development with select load partners. The next batch is being prepared for market in 2026.
A year of time saved in a fast market
Building a tool internally would have taken a year, and a consulting engagement would have added months to their project development timeline. With the data center market moving so quickly, Paces provided both the software and the analytical review faster than either alternative.
Credibility in partner conversations
EDF's data center partners are often already using Paces. When both sides work from the same platform, co-development decisions get made faster and with less friction. As Hoegler noted, "both parties can make better decisions together."
"It helped us put on that new hat and new lens to talk to these new partners and new potential clients."
— Peter Hoegler, Sr. Manager, Data Center Solutions
A deeper look:
EDF's path to powered land development
The story starts with a storm.
In early 2021, Winter Storm Uri swept through the southern United States, and EDF's wind projects in West Texas and South Texas bore the brunt of it. Many of those projects sat in areas where transmission infrastructure couldn't keep pace with generation, meaning 20 to 30 percent of their output was being sold at negative prices or curtailed entirely. Grid operators weren't moving fast enough to fix it.
So EDF started working on a different answer. Instead of moving power to load, what if they brought load to power?
The Asset Optimization team ran RFPs for flexible counterparties willing to co-locate directly at their substations and buy power behind the meter rather than through the grid. One of the first agreements was with Soluna at EDF's Los Majadas wind project in South Texas, one of the only operating behind-the-meter load installations at a wind facility in the country. It came online earlier this year.
That success changed EDF's development strategy. If co-location could solve a problem at operating projects, it could be designed in from the start. Peter Hoegler moved out of the Asset Optimization team and into a newly formed Data Center Solutions team. The mandate: identify EDF's development positions where co-locating a large flexible load made the most sense and develop energy parks around those opportunities.
By late 2025, the urgency was hard to miss. Hyperscalers were racing to secure time-to-power, and gigawatt-scale campus development had become a serious market target. EDF had land control and interconnection positions across the country. The opportunity was real, but with 90+ development sites in the pipeline, quickly separating the strongest candidates from the rest was the challenge.
EDF's internal GIS platform was well-suited to standalone energy development. It wasn't designed to answer questions specific to data center development:
- Which sites have fiber nearby?
- Which are close enough to population centers to support a workforce?
- Which have firm gas transport?
Those questions required a different dataset and filter set. The team weighed two alternatives. Building the capability internally would have taken at least a year. Engaging a traditional consulting firm would have added months and produced analysis that was already stale by the time it landed. What made Paces different was the combination: a platform built specifically for powered land evaluation, paired with a Development Services team that worked directly through EDF's pipeline. Paces analyzed and scored 90+ sites across siting, infrastructure, policy, and regulatory factors, producing a clear tier structure that EDF could act on immediately.
The engagement also gave EDF's team a working fluency in data center development. EDF's history is in energy generation, not powered land development, and the criteria that matter to a hyperscaler don’t fully match the criteria for wind or solar development. Paces helped close that gap.
EDF's tier one sites are now ready for active co-development, and the team is advancing the next wave toward market. When they sit down with data center developers to walk through a site, they often find their partner is using Paces too. Working from shared platform and data means both sides can spend less time debating assumptions and more time making decisions.
