In 2016, Illinois state legislators passed a fix to the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). The fix requires that renewable energy that counts toward the RPS to come from within the state lines. U.S. Solar sponsored this capstone project with the goal to develop a model that will locate tax parcels suitable for solar gardens.

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The model was developed using an AGILE project management approach. Three models were developed in one-month long iterations. With each development iteration, the model grew in functionality and accuracy. The final model is stored in the same directory as a designed, functional geodatabase. The geodatabase holds all the pre-processed data and the model results. Intermediate data created during model runs are placed in an intermediate feature dataset and deleted.