Renewable Energy Site Selection Application

Revolution Energy Systems

NLT developed RESSA (Renewable Energy Site Selection Application), a Flex-based Web application built on ESRI’s ArcGIS Server. RESSA is used to analyze the potential of dairy and swine operations for investment in renewable energies, including wind, solar, and anaerobic digestion (bio-gas). A primary source of the data that RESSA analyzes is a large dataset from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Because of the dataset’s complexity, NLT developers communicated directly with NREL representatives to better understand the formulas involved. With that knowledge in hand, NLT optimized the formulas to show the full energy potential of a specific site. Developing the application so it would remain as open as possible was a major challenge. The goal was to make the application easily portable to different backend technologies. To that end, business and database layers were separated, enabling easier system updates. The entire backend of the application is driven by Web services that can be used by any future application.