How to Reduce Bottlenecks in Early-Stage Solar & Storage Projects

Last updated Wednesday 28th May

Read time: 4 minutes

Here’s a harsh fact: for solar and battery storage developers, the early stages of a project are marked by frustration, delays, and spiraling costs. Developers today are navigating an increasingly complex landscape: larger portfolios, tougher permitting environments, hybrid solar + battery energy storage system (BESS) requirements, and unprecedented competition for the best project locations.

The global surge in utility-scale solar and storage pipelines - driven by decarbonization mandates, record-low levelized cost of energy (LCOE), and the rapid scaling of BESS to stabilize grids - is placing huge pressure on project teams to move faster. But delays in early-stage site screening and feasibility work threaten the ability of developers to keep pace.

This urgency makes eliminating inefficiencies and streamlining early-stage decision-making more important than ever for developers seeking to maintain competitive advantage.

Our goal with this article is to help solar and storage Project Developers understand and eliminate the bottlenecks that delay projects and increase costs.

TL;DR

1. Early-stage solar and storage projects often stall due to fragmented data, grid uncertainty, inefficient tools, and siloed teams.
2. These bottlenecks waste time, inflate costs, and slow growth—especially as developers juggle larger pipelines and tighter timelines.
3. The solution? Centralize GIS and project data, empower developers with the right tools, improve collaboration, and prioritize fast, visual communication.
4. Platforms like Glint Solar streamline this process - cutting site analysis time by over 80% and helping teams move from site prospecting to execution faster and smarter.
   
   

Where Bottlenecks Creep In: The Early-Stage Solar and Storage Project Development Process

Often hidden in plain sight, these inefficiencies quietly drain resources, extend timelines, and push promising projects to the back burner. As a result, understanding these bottlenecks is the first step toward eliminating them. From initial solar site selection to the first stakeholder meeting, the early-stage process involves dozens of touchpoints, each one a potential blocker if not managed efficiently.

Please note: The order of these steps may vary depending on local market conditions.

Prospecting and Evaluating

The first challenge comes at the very beginning: where can the project even go? GIS analysts and Solar Project Developers must assess topography, land use, exclusion zones, zoning laws, protected areas, flood risk, slope tolerances, and more. This phase alone can take weeks because collecting and combining these data layers can be very cumbersome. In fact, it’s not uncommon for GIS Specialists to rely on +30 data sources to collect what they need.

Even when this data is eventually aggregated (often into a generic GIS platform), these systems are rarely optimized for the specific needs of solar project development. As a result, GIS teams spend considerable time not only updating and maintaining datasets, but also extracting and formatting this information for Project Developers who may not be proficient with specialized GIS tools.

Interconnection and Grid Feasibility

Grid connection is often the “make or break” factor of a solar or storage project. Even the most promising site becomes unviable if interconnection is too costly, too distant, or unavailable within the required project timeline. Identifying feasible grid connection points is therefore one of the most critical—and time-consuming—steps in early-stage development.

Developers must assess multiple factors, including distance to substations, voltage levels, available capacity, queue status, grid upgrade requirements, and region-specific connection rules. Unfortunately, grid data and requirements vary widely by country and operator. For example:

• In the Nordics, complex regional balancing requirements, shifting power flows (e.g., Norway’s north-south industry demands), and the growing need for flexibility due to intermittent renewables create major uncertainty for developers. Securing grid capacity early is critical, as grid upgrades take years and available capacity at suitable sites is quickly reserved.
  
  
• In France, solar developers face the “File d’attente” (interconnection queue), where requests are processed on a first-come, first-served basis. This system can result in long delays, unpredictable costs, and the risk of abandonment after prolonged preparation if grid upgrades are deemed too costly. Developers must liaise with both regional DSOs like Enedis and the national TSO, RTE, to navigate the complex and often opaque connection approval process.

In many markets, the lack of standardized, centralized grid capacity data and procedures forces teams to conduct manual research or hire expensive consultants to run feasibility studies. In fast-moving markets with gigawatt-scale pipelines, this creates a serious bottleneck. Developers risk losing valuable queue positions, delaying project permitting, or even walking away from sites due to late-stage grid connection hurdles.

The result: what should be a straightforward technical assessment becomes a high-risk, resource-intensive process, often consuming weeks, months, or even years of project momentum at the most critical time for decision-making.

Preliminary Design

Once a site passes the first hurdles, the solar project design phase begins—but this stage is often plagued by its own inefficiencies. Project managers hand over preliminary site data to PV Engineers, who then spend days or weeks modeling layouts using AutoCAD, PVSyst, or other design tools.

Compounding the issue, these early datasets frequently lack critical information such as realistic buildable area analysis, slopes, or setback requirements. Engineers must constantly circle back to developers or GIS teams to clarify constraints. The result: multiple iterations, time wasted on redesigns, and engineering bandwidth tied up with work that could have been handled earlier. Additionally, this often takes Engineers away from later-stage projects that require their full attention.

The larger implication here is that scaling your operation as a solar developer hits a ceiling due to the limited resources you have to perform these tasks.

Sharing and Accessing Data Across Teams

Perhaps the biggest underlying cause of bottlenecks is data fragmentation. A single project can require inputs from:

• GIS teams for data layers and environmental constraints
• Developers for landowner negotiations
• Engineers for layout feasibility
• Regulatory consultants for permitting insights

While these functions are indispensable, the problem arises in how they work - often in isolation, using separate tools, file structures, and communication channels. The result is a disjointed, manual data flow that makes even minor project iterations labor-intensive. If a developer needs to adjust a layout or account for a newly discovered constraint, that request can trigger a ripple effect: the GIS team must source updated data, engineers must rerun simulations, and reports must be regenerated for stakeholder review.

This siloed approach delays decision-making and hampers the responsiveness needed to assess and advance projects quickly - particularly in early-stage site selection and permitting, where speed is often the competitive edge.

Landowner Outreach and Initial Permitting Prep

Even after identifying promising sites, developers must engage landowners and local stakeholders—a process that relies heavily on clear communication and compelling project visuals. Traditional workflows require manually assembling maps, layout plans, and preliminary designs from multiple disconnected tools, often resulting in delays and inconsistencies when responding to stakeholder feedback.

In competitive markets, landowners are often approached by multiple developers and will typically favor the team that demonstrates the highest likelihood of successfully delivering the project. Developers who cannot quickly present professional, clear project proposals—including accurate site plans, buildable area estimates, and energy potential—risk losing out to faster, more organized competitors. For landowners, the risk is not just about partnership, but about payment: if a project fails to materialize, they receive nothing.

The absence of a centralized reporting process forces project teams to create custom maps, designs, and capacity estimates in fragmented formats, leading to duplicated work and frequent adjustments between Project Developers, GIS Specialists, Engineers, and external consultants.

This constant back-and-forth can consume valuable weeks of project momentum, as teams struggle to update layouts, capacity estimates, and visual representations of the proposed solar or storage project to meet the expectations of landowners, permitting authorities, and internal stakeholders.

The Cost of Bottlenecks: Time, Money, and Lost Opportunity

While bottlenecks may seem like unavoidable growing pains, they come with steep financial and operational costs.

Project Delays

Each delay in solar and storage site screening, layout design, or grid interconnection analysis pushes the project timeline back. What should take days often stretches into weeks and months. As site evaluation timelines balloon, projects risk falling behind permitting schedules or losing priority grid connection slots.

In competitive markets, delays directly translate to lost deals. Landowners may move forward with faster competitors. Utilities may close interconnection application windows. Developers who fail to act quickly may find themselves edged out of lucrative opportunities. 

Wasted Time & Resources

Even when work stays in-house, internal inefficiencies drain time and reduce productivity. Highly skilled team members end up focusing on manual, repetitive tasks instead of progressing projects.

• Project Developers become coordinators instead of deal-makers, chasing updates between GIS teams, Engineers, and external consultants. They spend excessive time preparing or updating outdated site visualizations or landowner presentation documents, instead of advancing negotiations or regulatory approvals.
  
  
• GIS Analysts spend hours manually combining land use maps, slope data, exclusion zones, and infrastructure proximity from disconnected sources for every new site evaluation. For companies running dozens of projects in parallel, this repetitive task consumes hundreds of unnecessary hours per year.
  
  
• Engineers are often forced to redraw early-stage layouts multiple times as new site data becomes available. They update setbacks, redesign layouts in AutoCAD, and run new models instead of focusing on high-value design and engineering work for later-stage projects.

The result is not just frustration - it’s a serious constraint on a solar or storage developer’s ability to scale efficiently.

Take leading French solar energy producers Photosol, for example. Photosol aimed to lead the charge in renewable energy but faced real challenges scaling their operation due to complex site GIS data in France and scattered data across tools and Excel files.

But thanks to Glint Solar, they were about to reduce site analysis time by over 83% and cut project delays by 20%.

Read the full case study here. 

 “With Glint Solar, we've transformed our site analysis to a swift 5-10 minute process, drastically improving our speed and efficiency. We've also cut project delays by 20%, allowing us to accelerate our development pipeline and focus on what truly matters—delivering quality projects faster than ever.”

Jean Chartier Photovoltaic Development Manager, France at Photosol

Increased Internal & External Costs

Inefficient internal workflows drive up labor costs, but the reliance on external consultants amplifies the problem. Without full internal visibility or the right early-stage tools, many developers are forced to outsource grid feasibility studies or preliminary BESS design simulations. External consultants can charge thousands per assessment and require weeks to deliver reports. In fact, these sorts of delays can result in $100,000+ in soft costs from redundant engineering hours.

Opportunity Cost: The Hidden Killer

Possibly the most damaging impact of these bottlenecks is the opportunity cost of projects that never get off the ground. Developers tied up with slow-moving assessments may not have the bandwidth to pursue additional landowner conversations, grid studies, or permitting work on parallel sites. The end result is lost opportunity when competitors with tighter, more efficient workflows lock in prime sites.

Best Practices to Reduce Bottlenecks in Early-Stage Solar and Storage Development

The good news - many of the delays and inefficiencies facing Developers today are preventable. Here’s our top four tips to maximize efficiency and reduce these bottlenecks once and for all:

1. Centralize GIS and Project Data
   Fragmented data is the root of most bottlenecks. Create a single centralized data environment where GIS, grid connection, status of landowner negotiations, permitting, and engineering data can be shared and updated in real time. This reduces miscommunication and saves hours on manual file transfers.
   
   

2. Empower Project Developers With the Right Tools
   Waiting for GIS teams or Engineers to validate every new site drains time. Equip Project Developers with intuitive tools and pre-approved design templates so they can confidently progress feasibility checks independently, without compromising accuracy.
   
   

3. Use Tools That Allow Collaboration
   When tools don’t talk to each other, neither do teams. Challenges arise when collaboration requires constant file transfers, version tracking, or jumping between platforms. Choose solutions that allow real-time collaboration, keep all design iterations and reports in one place, and enable role-based access for different team members. This reduces back-and-forth, improves documentation, and ensures continuity even as teams grow or shift.
   
   

4. Prioritize Fast, Visual Communication
   Early stakeholder discussions often depend on clear visuals: site maps, preliminary designs, yield forecasts, and grid connection points and capacity data. Develop fast and consistent methods to deliver polished outputs early, reducing the number of back-and-forth adjustments.
   
   

Breaking the Bottleneck: The Glint Solar Way

Glint Solar was built to eliminate bottlenecks with a single, streamlined platform that empowers solar and storage developers to collaborate faster, make smarter data-driven decisions, and accelerate project pipelines from day one.

With Glint Solar, developers can now perform the entire pre-permit workflow in one place—from site prospecting and evaluation, preliminary design and analysis, 3D visualization, and report generation. 

Centralized Layered Data for Quick Site Evaluation

Using Glint Solar’s GIS Layers library, Solar Developers can select from over 100 carefully selected constraint layers, or upload their own data, without ever having to leave the tool. This library is consistently updated and contains everything you need to get site evaluation right from the start including: 

• Infrastructure layers like substation locations, grid lines and contour lines
• Protected, flooding and wetland areas
• Market-specific data to support new market expansion 

Consolidating this key GIS data helps to streamline the project verification process and reduces the reliance on multiple tools, while also enhancing overall productivity.

Glint Solar's Layers library

Assessing site distance to nearby substations is simple and easy using Glint Solar

Engineering-Approved Design for Simplified Design and Analysis

Glint Solar empowers both Project Developers and Engineers to work faster and smarter. Engineers can set predefined layout configurations, giving developers the autonomy to run accurate pre-designs without waiting on approvals. Engineers can also jump in directly without having to rely on AutoCAD.

By integrating structured technical data and evaluation guidelines (including inverter or panel types, AC/DC ratio, panel orientation, ground coverage ratio, row distance, and more), Glint Solar facilitates a seamless transfer of technical information for precision evaluation and accelerated decision-making. 

Glint Solar’s performance has been independently benchmarked against PVsyst, giving teams full confidence in early-stage yield estimates.

Engineering approved designs are built right into Glint Solar

3D Project Visualization

Glint Solar allows developers to instantly generate professional, detailed 3D visualizations of a project site in seconds. With clear, accurate layouts ready at the earliest stage, teams can confidently present landowners, municipalities, and permitting authorities with realistic visual plans that build trust and accelerate approvals. This not only helps secure landowner agreements faster but also reduces costly back-and-forth adjustments with internal teams and external stakeholders.

The end result? Smoother approvals, faster stakeholder buy-in, and a clearer path from site prospecting to project execution - all while saving valuable time and resources.

Reducing bottlenecks in early-stage solar and storage development isn’t just about working faster - it’s about working smarter. The challenges developers face today, from fragmented data and interconnection uncertainty to inefficient workflows and missed landowner opportunities, are no longer acceptable in a market moving at gigawatt-scale speed. As competition intensifies and timelines tighten, project teams need tools that empower autonomy, improve collaboration, and bring clarity to the earliest stages of development. 

Glint Solar was built for exactly this: to help solar and storage developers turn complex, time-consuming workflows into streamlined, scalable systems. Whether you're managing dozens of sites or entering a new market, our platform gives you the visibility, flexibility, and speed to get ahead—and stay there.