// Industries / Solar
Drone LiDAR for Solar & Renewables
Utility-scale site intelligence from prospecting through as-builts — bare-earth terrain under the vegetation, slope truth before you option the land, and corridor data for the interconnection.
- FAA-Certified Pilots
- Licensed Surveyor Partners
- Serving All 50 States
- 24-Hour Quote Turnaround
01// The Problem
Bad Terrain Data Kills Solar Economics Quietly
Utility-scale solar lives or dies on slope. A parcel that looks flat in public elevation data can hide swales, terraces, and grade breaks that push racking outside tolerance and turn a "minimal grading" pro forma into a mass-grading budget. Public DEMs are too coarse for pile design, often years old, and blind to what the brush has been doing since they were flown. Photogrammetry doesn't fix it — on the overgrown farmland and timbered tracts where solar gets sited, cameras map the top of the vegetation, not the ground your piles go into.
The result is familiar: buildable-area estimates that shrink after the option is signed, grading quantities that balloon at 60% design, and an interconnection route nobody mapped until it became the critical path.
02// The Fix
Bare-Earth Truth at Every Project Stage
Drone LiDAR penetrates vegetation gaps to return true ground, so the terrain model your engineers design against is the terrain the EPC will actually grade. Across the project lifecycle:
- Prospecting and diligence. Fly candidate parcels before you commit. A bare-earth DEM turns slope, aspect, and buildable acreage from an estimate into a measurement — cheap insurance against optioning the wrong land.
- Design-stage topo. Our topographic mapping gives civil and racking teams the surface and contours they need for grading design, hydrology, and pile planning.
- Gen-tie and collector routes. Corridor mapping covers the interconnection path — often the least-understood terrain on the project — with long-linear capture priced per mile.
- Construction and as-builts. Progress flights verify grading against design, and a closeout scan documents finished conditions for the owner, the independent engineer, and financing.
With local pilots in all 50 states, a multi-state portfolio gets flown in parallel — not sequentially as one crew drives between counties.
03// Deliverables
Formats Your Engineers and GIS Team Share
Solar projects run on two parallel toolchains — CAD for civil design and GIS for land and screening — so we deliver to both: ground-classified LAS/LAZ and Civil 3D-ready contours for the engineers, DEM GeoTIFFs and SHP files for the GIS analysts ranking parcels and drawing buildable-area boundaries. One capture, no re-digitizing between departments.
04// FAQ
Solar Questions, Answered
Can LiDAR see the ground through vegetation on an unmaintained parcel?
Yes — that is the core advantage over photogrammetry. LiDAR pulses pass through gaps in brush and canopy, and ground classification separates terrain returns from vegetation, producing a true bare-earth DEM even on overgrown farmland or timbered tracts.
Can you fly multiple candidate sites in different states?
Yes. Because we contract vetted, FAA-certified pilots across all 50 states, a portfolio of candidate parcels can be flown in parallel by local pilots and processed to one QA standard — so every site in your ranking is compared on identical data.
What deliverables do racking and civil engineers actually use?
Ground-classified LAS/LAZ, a bare-earth DEM GeoTIFF for slope and aspect analysis, CAD contours for grading design, and SHP files for GIS-based buildable-area screening. Surfaces load directly into Civil 3D and the pile-layout tools your engineers already run.
Do you handle the gen-tie route as well as the array area?
Yes. Gen-tie and collector routes are captured as corridor projects — long, narrow flight plans priced per linear mile — so the interconnection path is mapped with the same accuracy as the array footprint, in one mobilization where geography allows.
05// Start a Project
Get a Quote for Your Solar Site
Upload a KML/KMZ of the parcel or portfolio — most quotes come back within 24 hours.
- Direct line
- (877) 729-5311
- team@prolidar.com