AI location intelligence for grid operators.
When transformer density needs to quadruple and substation lead times are five to nine years, location decisions can no longer take twelve months.
Substation candidate · Utrecht-Noord
Scoring criteria
The problem
Substations are the bottleneck of the energy transition. Locating them is the bottleneck of the bottleneck.
Where one transformer once served 100 homes, the norm is now 25. Stack the housing program on top. Layer grid congestion underneath. Add a permitting trajectory of one to two years per location — assuming nothing slips.
Most operators still scout sites the way they did in 2010: manual GIS work, follow-up requests for cadastral data, separate consultations with land owners, and a public-opposition screen that only kicks in after a candidate has already been committed to.
Locata helps grid operators accelerate site selection for substations, transformer locations, and HV/MV connections — with the data sources, opposition signals, and land-acquisition feasibility scored together, in one pass.
Qué hace Locata
Cuatro casos de uso, una plataforma.
El mismo backbone de puntuación aplicado a las decisiones que los equipos de utilities toman cada trimestre.
Investment plan dossier underpinning
For the biennial investment plans submitted to ACM, Locata delivers location reasoning that holds up to public consultation: standardised across regions, traceable to the underlying registries, defensible at hearings.
Public opposition risk in the first screen
Through Street View context, distance to residences, prior opposition patterns, and environmental factors, we surface which candidates carry objection risk before you commit. The candidates that pass have already cleared the screen that previously caught them at week 60.
Land acquisition prioritisation
Per candidate parcel: ownership type, number of owners, and (where publicly known) transaction history. Helps your land team prioritise where acquisition is feasible quickly versus where you'll be in negotiation for a year.
Integration with your GIS
Locata doesn't sit in a silo. We integrate with internal GIS (ESRI, FME), asset management (Maximo, IFS), and project systems via API or scheduled export. Your single source of truth stays where it is.
Datos que conectamos
Las fuentes detrás de cada puntuación.
Per-candidate enrichment for grid operators draws on a wider set than the typical vertical — the layered Dutch geodata stack plus operator-specific public capacity indicators.
Consulta la lista completa de enriquecimiento para cadencia y cobertura.
Kadaster
Cadastral records — parcels, owners, transactions.
BAG
Buildings & addresses — residences within distance contours.
BGT
Surface inventory — pavement, vegetation, footprint.
BRO
Subsurface registry — soil, groundwater, contamination.
Public substation registries
Existing assets and grid topology.
Environmental contour data
Noise, EMF, ecology buffer zones.
Municipal zoning plans
Bestemmingsplannen via PDOK where published.
Grid operator public capacity data
Liander, Stedin, Enexis congestion indicators.
Street View
Frontage, sightlines, immediate neighbour context.
What a report looks like
Per-candidate scoring with reasoning, formatted for your dossier.
Every shortlisted location ships with a full reasoning page — top three reasons it scored where it did, top two risks the models flagged, and the data citations behind each. Formatted for inclusion in ACM dossiers and stakeholder consultations.
[ vista previa esquemática — capturas reales por cliente reservadas ]
Precios
Enterprise engagements.
Investment-plan-scale work is scoped per region and per planning cycle. Talk to us about scope, integration, and timing.
Cómo empezamos
How we start.
A typical grid operator engagement begins with a scoped pilot on one investment region — usually 200 to 800 candidate parcels — to validate the methodology against your existing scouting work. From there it scales to full investment-plan coverage with a quarterly refresh cadence.
- 01Week 1: prompt definition + data integration
- 02Week 2-3: scoring run + reasoning review with your team
- 03Week 4: handover (PDF dossier + GeoJSON + GIS integration)
FAQ
Grid operators: preguntas frecuentes.
What is Locata for grid operators?
Locata is an AI site selection tool for grid operators that screens substation, transformer, and HV/MV connection candidates against the European public-data stack — Kadaster, BAG, BGT, BRO, environmental contours, municipal zoning — and scores each with three AI models in parallel. The output is investment-plan-ready: ranked candidates with reasoning that survives ACM consultation.How does Locata help with substation site selection?
Locata pre-qualifies every candidate parcel in your investment region against physical constraints (parcel size, distance to existing grid), regulatory constraints (zoning, environmental buffers), and public-opposition signals (residence density, prior objection patterns) in one pass. The screening that previously took twelve months happens in weeks, and the public-opposition risk surfaces in week three instead of month thirty.Can Locata integrate with our internal GIS?
Yes. Locata exports GeoJSON, CSV, and PDF dossiers, and offers a REST API for live integration with ESRI/ArcGIS, FME, internal asset-management platforms (Maximo, IFS), and project portfolios. We don't replace your single source of truth — we feed it.How does Locata assess public opposition risk?
Through layered signals: distance to nearest residences via BAG, Street View visual context, environmental contour data, municipal zoning plans, and (where publicly available) prior opposition patterns in the gemeente. Candidates with high objection risk are flagged before commitment, with the reasoning cited so your stakeholder-engagement team can prepare.Is Locata's output suitable for ACM consultation?
Yes — that's a primary design constraint. Every score traces back to its enrichment inputs with citations, the methodology is auditable end-to-end, and the per-candidate reasoning is formatted to drop into ACM investment plan dossiers. We do not automate the decision; we provide defensible underpinning for it.How do we start a Locata pilot for grid planning?
A typical engagement opens with one investment region — 200 to 800 candidate parcels — over four weeks: week one for prompt definition and data integration, weeks two and three for the scoring run and reasoning review with your team, week four for handover including GIS integration. From there it scales to full investment-plan coverage with a quarterly refresh cadence.
Lectura relacionada
Más contexto sobre cómo funciona Locata y dónde encaja.
Multi-model AI scoring, explained.
Why three frontier models score every Locata candidate independently — and why disagreement between them is more informative than any single confidence number.
LeerArgumentWhy location is the bottleneck of the energy transition.
Capacity, hardware, and finance are all scaling. The constraint that's eating the calendar is permitting — and permitting starts with site selection.
LeerComparaciónHerramientas de inteligencia de ubicación con IA en Europa
Cómo Locata se compara con el reducido conjunto de herramientas con IA y profundidad de datos europeos.
CompararComparaciónMejor software de selección de emplazamientos 2026
Nueve herramientas comparadas honestamente — en qué destaca cada una, qué cuesta, dónde se queda corta.
CompararPruébalo con tus datos
Ver Locata en candidatos de utilities.
30 minutos, en línea. Trae un conjunto de candidatos de muestra — ejecutamos una puntuación en vivo con justificación completa por ubicación.