Case Study: NREL achieves advanced renewable energy insights with CARTO spatial analysis

Advancing Renewable Energy through Spatial Analysis and Visualization

NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, needed better ways to analyze and visualize highly complex renewable energy data across space and time. As the U.S. federal lab focused solely on renewable energy research and development, NREL used CARTO to help make sense of challenges such as resource variability, transmission constraints, land-use barriers, and the difficulty of modeling wind and solar potential at scale.

CARTO supported NREL’s spatial analysis and visualization efforts, including work on the Renewable Energy Potential Model (reV), which combines resource data, systems engineering, economics, spatial constraints, and transmission analysis. The result was a more integrated geospatial framework that produced supply curves and projected renewable buildout, helping validate modeling against existing turbine locations and extend research impact by sharing results more clearly with a broader audience.

NREL

Anthony Lopez

Senior Geospatial Data Scientist