Case Study
How New Energy Equity scaled solar origination across 16 states and saved $175,000 with Paces
New Energy Equity
Background:
New Energy Equity is a developer, owner, and operator of solar energy projects across the United States. Over the past decade, the company has developed 600+ megawatts of solar capacity across 16 states, with a focus on community solar programs, PPAs, and behind-the-meter projects.
Unique approach:
New Energy Equity distinguishes itself through operational discipline and a strong track record of delivering projects. Landowners want confidence that the projects they lease to will be permitted and constructed, and New Energy Equity's experience proves it can deliver that. A dedicated GIS team, working in close coordination with a centralized marketing and outreach function, allows the company to systematically prospect at a scale that few solar developers can match.
The challenge
Before New Energy Equity built out a dedicated GIS function, site origination was decentralized and difficult to manage at scale. Three problems stood out:
- Siloed teams with no shared process: Without a GIS team, land agents and the origination team each handled site selection independently. Every land agent had their own criteria. For example, one might choose a site near floodplains, and another might disqualify any site near wetlands. There was no standardized ruleset, no shared platform, and no way to ensure that sites exiting the origination process were evaluated consistently or had the same high-quality.
- Manual, parcel-by-parcel work that couldn't scale: Before Paces, site identification meant manually reviewing sites one at a time, using tools that charged on a per-parcel basis. The previous platform worked well for small searches but created real cost volatility as New Energy Equity's ambitions grew. Operating across 16 states with unpredictable per-parcel costs made it impossible to plan large campaigns or scale up quickly when market conditions called for it. It wasn't a scalable enterprise.
- Slow, inconsistent handoffs from origination to development: Without a centralized workflow, the path from identifying a site to getting a letter in front of a landowner took roughly a month. Each land agent formatted their outreach differently. There was no shared database to track which sites had been contacted or what had come back. Leadership had limited visibility into pipeline quality, and couldn't confidently scale origination up or down without a consistent process.
The solution
New Energy Equity built its origination workflow around Paces, using the platform to enforce shared site criteria, remove the per-parcel cost ceiling, and create a vertically organized pipeline from site discovery through landowner outreach. Three changes made the biggest difference:
- A shared, standardized set of site criteria: Dawson Rogers, CRM and Operations Manager, brought all the land agents together to align on a single qualifying standard for wetlands thresholds, floodplain rules, transmission proximity, and hosting capacity requirements. Those criteria were encoded into Paces as filters that the entire team works from. When standards need to change, Dawson can update them in the platform once rather than communicating new guidelines to every agent and hoping they're applied consistently.
- A scalable origination engine without per-parcel constraints: Paces removed the ceiling that Landgate's per-parcel pricing had imposed. The team shifted from one-at-a-time site viewing to running campaigns. With Paces, the NEE team has been able to run 700+ targeted siting campaigns. The only remaining bottleneck for campaigns is how quickly landowners can receive mail via USPS.
- A vertically organized origination process: Paces enabled New Energy Equity to build a structured pipeline where the GIS team identifies and qualifies sites, the marketing team executes standardized outreach, and land agents receive contacts and manage relationships through lease signing. This vertical structure replaced the fragmented, agent-by-agent workflow, and gave leadership a consistent, trackable process, with the ability to benchmark performance year over year for the first time.
"The time from site identification to sending the letter is probably around twice as fast now,"
— Dawson Rogers, CRM and Operations Manager, New Energy Equity
The shift to a Paces-based origination workflow produced immediate, measurable results for NEE's speed, scale, and site quality:
Significantly improved site quality across the board
Leadership reported a marked improvement in the quality of sites coming out of the GIS team. With shared criteria enforced through the platform, downstream issues became far less common. The entire origination funnel tightened, and Paces reduced the amount of dead sites and unnecessary effort expended by the team.
Higher volume outreach and six-figure cost savings
After standardizing on Paces, New Energy Equity contacted hundreds of thousands of parcels in a 12-month period. A volume that would have been financially and operationally out of reach under the old per-parcel model. After switching from a price-per-export model with their previous provider, NEE estimates that they’ve saved over $175,000.
30x faster site origination
The time from identifying a site to getting the first letter to a landowner dropped from approximately one month to the same day. The team's limiting factor is now postal delivery, not internal process.
"Paces has been a critical part of how we scale up the work we're doing here. We really needed a tool that can help us identify a lot of sites quickly. Paces has done a really nice job of that."
— Kyle Marchesseault, VP of Marketing, New Energy Equity
A deeper look:
Building a greater efficiency and scale at New Energy Equity
When Dawson Rogers joined New Energy Equity, the company didn't have a GIS team. Origination was something land agents handled on their own, alongside everything else. Each agent had a region, a set of tools, and a method, and often those methods didn't have much in common.
Dawson came from a GIS background. His career in renewable energy started in Minnesota during the community solar boom of 2019, digitizing three-phase lines for smaller developers. After time in telecom and rural broadband, he joined NEE with a clear mandate: build a GIS function from scratch and create a systematic process for how the company finds and qualifies solar development sites.
The problem he found wasn't unusual. Site selection was fragmented across the land agent team, each of whom had developed their own preferences and criteria over time. Outreach sheets looked different depending on who produced them. When a site made it through to the marketing team, it wasn't always clear whether it had been evaluated against the same standard as the last one. The team would run into site quality problems, such as geographic, wetland, or transmission issues, due to differing criteria used by the land agents.
The team was also facing issues with scaling. New Energy Equity had been using another development platform, which charged on a per-parcel basis. For small, focused searches in the six states they were originally looking at, that was manageable. For a company looking to expand to 16 states that needed to prospect at a serious scale, the cost model created friction. Projecting what a large campaign would cost was difficult, and hitting a cost ceiling mid-campaign was a real risk. The tool wasn't designed for the volume of prospecting New Energy Equity needed to do.
Dawson and the New Energy Equity team evaluated alternatives before landing on Paces. What drew him in was the way Paces was designed: not as a generic data provider, but as a purpose-built platform for the specific work of solar site origination. Paces had the layers the team needed: parcel data, transmission lines, substations, hosting capacity, wetlands. All of the data layers are accessible through a single web interface without requiring anyone to pull five datasets and make them work together.
One of Dawson’s first moves on the platform was to bring all the land agents together to discuss criteria. Once they decided on site standards, Paces let him encode those decisions into a shared filter set that the whole team works from and that leadership can update at once without retraining every agent individually.
Paces democratized GIS use across the New Energy Equity team by giving GIS capability to team members who haven’t necessarily been trained as GIS analysts. Land agents can look at the map, adjust filters, and understand the sites they're working on without needing to know how the underlying data was assembled. The interconnection team has a single place to go for hosting capacity information in a standardized format, rather than downloading utility reports and manually combining columns. The permitting team uses the Permitting Predictor to inform early-stage development decisions.
The operational shift happened quickly. Instead of each agent prospecting on their own, New Energy Equity built a pipeline: the GIS team runs campaigns, generates qualified site lists, and uploads them to Salesforce the same day. The marketing team executes outreach using standardized formats. Land agents receive contacts and manage relationships through lease signing. What had been a loosely coordinated, agent-by-agent process became a systematic workflow that leadership could measure and refine.
"The time from site identification to sending the letter is probably around twice as fast now," Dawson says. "Before, it might have been around a month. Now we're really only limited by how fast USPS works."
The scale numbers tell the rest of the story. In the per-parcel era, there was always a ceiling on how aggressively New Energy Equity could prospect. For example, pre-Paces New Energy Equity was able to prospect fewer than 10,000 sites in Illinois, in 2024, that number doubled and then quintupled in 2025.
"You can just go into the tool and use it. I don't need to aggregate a three-phase layer, a substation layer, a utility service area, a hosting capacity map, and a parcel layer. I'd have to go find those five things immediately if Paces went away."
Dawson also credits Paces' responsiveness to New Energy Equity's specific workflow needs as a driver of how the relationship has developed. Team members have a direct line to the Paces team through the support chat function, and feature requests that come out of those conversations have made their way into the platform. The result is a tool that reflects how New Energy Equity actually works, not just how a developer theoretically might.
