Picture this: you’re a solar developer knee-deep in the pre-permit grind. You’re scouring maps for sites close to a substation, wrestling with slope and environmental data to avoid a design disaster, and trying to whip up visuals that won’t make landowners’ eyes doubt over your plan.
Solar development today is a race against the clock. Land is scarce, competition is fierce, and delays in the pre-permit phase can kill deals before they ever break ground.
And yet, many developers are still juggling a chaotic stack of tools - ArcGIS for site data, AutoCAD for layouts, PVSyst for yield estimates, Excel for reporting, and a dozen folders and emails to glue it all together. Each tool works fine on its own, but together? It’s a disconnected mess.
That disjointed workflow isn’t just inconvenient, it’s expensive. Missed data, repeated engineering work, and slow stakeholder approvals can delay projects by weeks and cost hundreds of thousands in lost opportunity and soft costs.
If your team is still spending 4–6 weeks just to screen a single site, or struggling to update designs across tools, you’re not alone. But you are falling behind.
In this article, we’ll break down:
Let’s dig into the hidden costs of your current stack and how to future-proof your workflow for a faster, more scalable pipeline.
The pre-permit phase should be a well-oiled process: screen land, test feasibility, design, and move forward. But for many developers, this is exactly where things start to unravel.
You might be chasing down the latest GIS data, waiting days for a yield estimate from a consultant, or scrambling to adjust a layout after a zoning change. It’s a familiar story - too many tools, none of them connected, and your team stuck stitching everything together just to keep the process moving.
Each workflow step lives in its own silo:
The result? Endless time spent copying, exporting, and manually stitching files together just to get one site evaluation out the door.
Moving site boundaries from ArcGIS into AutoCAD. Exporting layouts into visualization tools. Emailing yield data back and forth with consultants. These steps slow your team down—not because they’re difficult, but because they’re disconnected. Every handoff introduces a risk of misalignment.
A single missed terrain constraint or a layout built on outdated zoning data can force weeks of rework. When engineers spend hours fixing upstream issues, they’re pulled away from higher-value design and permitting work.
If it takes your team six weeks to move from a site lead to a presentable concept, someone else is already pitching the landowner or submitting interconnection paperwork. These inefficiencies are silent deal-killers.
For a typical 150 MW utility-scale project, this fragmented workflow can cost:
Whether you’re a small team struggling with the complexity of AutoCAD, or a large developer facing cross-market standardization issues, the root problem is the same: your tools don’t talk to each other. Every stakeholder revision becomes another back-and-forth, and every project update feels like a reset.
Instead of juggling half a dozen disconnected tools, leading solar developers are consolidating their workflows into a more intelligent, integrated stack with Glint Solar at the core.
Glint Solar was purpose-built for utility-scale solar and battery developers to eliminate the friction, delay, and complexity of the pre-permit phase. From land screening to layout design, yield estimates, and 3D stakeholder visuals, Glint brings your workflow into one intuitive platform, designed with developers in mind.
Here’s how top teams are building faster, smarter workflows using Glint:
Forget the days of scraping ArcGIS or relying on overburdened GIS teams. Glint Solar comes with hundreds of pre-loaded, solar-relevant data layers, like substation proximity, land use, slope, zoning, and environmental constraints, available across global markets.
With Glint’s intelligent parcel search and customizable polygons, you can target viable sites near infrastructure, filter out unbuildable land, and compare multiple parcels, all in one workspace.
Glint Solar’s easy-to-use design tools, with smarter object organization (grouping by PV areas, exclusion zones) and intersect/subtract polygons, enable solar developers to create pre-permit layouts on their own in a few minutes. This means that non-technical teams can iterate designs, right in front of the landowner, without waiting on engineers, thus freeing the engineering teams for detailed design tasks.
Take leading French solar energy producer Photsol, for example. Photosol aimed to lead the charge in renewable energy, but faced serious hurdles getting there. Navigating GIS data in France was complex, site analysis was a lengthy process, and they were too reliant on their PV Engineers to complete early-stage project assessments.
With Glint Solar’s streamlined site analysis tools, Photosol reduced their site prospecting and analysis time from an average of 30 minutes per site to just 5 to 10 minutes. Plus, Photosol significantly improved communication between different teams, leading to quicker decision-making on critical project milestones.
Check out the full case study here.
Glint Solar’s instant yield estimates, using 15 years of 30-minute interval data, align within -1.23% to 0.02% of PVSyst, perfect for early viability checks. Organization-wide PV profiles standardize settings across teams, ensuring consistency for multi-market portfolios.
Check out our Glint Solar and PVSyst Comparison Report to dive deeper.
Winning stakeholder support often comes down to how well you can tell the story. Glint Solar helps you create photorealistic 3D visuals, complete with terrain, trees, fences, and site components, turning technical layouts into compelling narratives.
With just a few clicks, you can export professional, high-resolution maps and visuals tailored to municipalities, landowners, or internal execs. No plugins, no design team, no delays.
With hybrid projects on the rise (67% of utility-scale developments), Glint’s BESS Design Tool unifies solar and battery layouts with accurate 3D visuals, saving weeks compared to outsourced simulations. “It’s consultant-level output without the bill,” per one developer.
Glint’s portfolio hub is your single source of truth, storing every project’s details such as site specs, designs, yield runs, landowner notes, zoning updates, and more in one place. You can track statuses, compare sites, and pull data for any project instantly, no digging through folders or emails. This centralized approach means no more lost revisions or missed stakeholder feedback, keeping your pipeline under control.
Teams anchoring their pre-permit workflow with Glint Solar report:
In a market where speed closes deals and land is snapped up quickly, a fragmented tech stack isn’t just inefficient, it’s a strategic risk.
Glint Solar gives solar and hybrid developers a modern foundation to scale smarter. By replacing disjointed tools with one unified platform, you’re not just saving time, you’re accelerating decisions, empowering your team, and staying competitive in a fast-moving industry.