How a Finnish IPP cut the manual GIS work out of site screening, brought BESS noise modeling in-house, and now answers landowner leads in minutes.
"Glint saves the team significant time each week, reducing the hours spent on manual work and juggling multiple files. Furthermore, the platform helps avoid costs associated with outsourcing visualization creation and noise modeling to consultants."
Aaro Hocksell
Project Manager, Skarta Energy
Skarta Energy is a Finnish independent power producer founded in 2021, working toward 800 MW-peak of capacity by 2030. Reaching that number means screening high-voltage grid-connected sites above 50 MW to 100 MW, and screening a lot of them. That's slow going when every candidate has to be assembled by hand out of separate GIS sources.
Five people at Skarta now work in Glint Solar: project managers, executive leadership, the land acquisition specialist, and the electrical engineer. Inbound landowner leads get screened on the map instead of by hand, BESS noise modeling runs in-house, and the spend that used to go to consultants for noise calculations has close to disappeared.
When Aaro Hocksell joined Skarta Energy as Project Manager, site selection ran the way it runs in most development teams. Landowners were getting in touch constantly, and each inquiry had to be checked by hand. Pull the parcel, find its boundaries, work out whether anything could be built on it. Plenty of those properties turned out to be too small or physically unconstructable, and the only way to find that out was to do the work first.
The second cost sat further along the process, in permitting and pre-design. Project visualizations and BESS noise modeling both went out to external consultants, which meant a wait of weeks and an invoice at the end of it. Change the layout and that cycle started over. Aaro's push was to modernize the workflow and get past both the manual GIS assembly and the outsourcing.
Skarta Energy consolidated screening and pre-design onto Glint Solar, and the inbound lead problem was the first thing to go. Aaro sets up constraint profiles to filter for suitable land near power lines, then enters a parcel ID to put a landowner's property on the map with its buildable area already worked out. A site that can't carry a project is ruled out before anyone spends a day on it.
Then came the noise work. Aaro and the engineering team tested Glint Solar's preliminary BESS noise modeling alongside the map export layers, and that was the point the platform earned its place. Calculations that had gone out to a consultant and come back weeks later now run in the same session as the layout that prompted them.
The rest of the workflow settled around those two steps. The PV designer builds preliminary layouts in Glint Solar and exports them to AutoCAD for detailed design. Management reviews the plans in the same map the developers work in, which is where feasibility gets confirmed or questioned. Nobody is emailing a shapefile around to find out where a project stands.
Skarta has close to eliminated the need to outsource BESS noise calculations. The work now happens in the platform the engineering team already has open, which removes the consultant invoice and the wait that came with it. The output is a preliminary estimate and still needs regulatory confirmation before formal submission, but the answer that shapes an early design arrives on the day it's asked for. Aurinkokarhu, also developing in Finland, moved the same work in-house for the same reason.
Compiling GIS data by hand and reconciling disconnected files took a real share of the team's week, and most of that has gone. Aaro's own description is the plainest one: significant time saved each week, with less of it spent making files agree with each other.
Vetting an inbound inquiry used to take hours or days. With parcel IDs and constraint profiles doing the first pass, it takes minutes. Speed isn't the whole of it either, because a landowner who gets a quick and specific answer is a landowner who stays in the conversation.
Skarta runs development from one single source of truth, so project managers, the electrical engineer and executive management work from the same map instead of three versions of it. Layered map exports carry the team through public municipal presentations. Nature conservation overlays and 3D views let them answer community questions on the spot, and build social acceptability while a project is still being planned. And because Finland's GIS data updates automatically inside Glint Solar, nobody at Skarta maintains a data library any more.
Skarta Energy replaced manual GIS screening and outsourced acoustic work with one workspace that carries a site from an inbound email through to a layout the engineering team can export. Leads are screened before they cost anyone a day, noise maps are produced in-house, and the consultant spend that used to sit between a question and its answer is close to gone. For an IPP chasing 800 MW-peak by 2030, that changes how many sites the team can afford to look at in the first place.
Book a demo and see how Glint Solar can help your team qualify sites and model BESS projects in one map.