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 created using ArcPy. The script creates a list of all the counties in the study area. A 'for' loop is created and runs a sequence of code for each county. The sequence of code performs a series of clips, buffers, and queries to isolate all the unsuitable of area that falls within the county boundaries. All the unsuitable area is combined and dissolved. The dissolved polygon is used as the erase feature for the tax parcels in the county. After the unsuitable area has been erased from the tax parcels, a new field is added to the parcel layer for parcel acreage. The acreage is re-calculated. Parcels that have a remaining area of suitable land between 8-20 acres are selected and placed in a 'Selection' feature dataset within a functional geodatabase. 

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The script is 141 lines of code and takes 70 minutes to run.