Spark AI October Product Update: BESS, Heatmaps, Realtime Zoning Search

October was a big month for Spark.

We made battery storage a first-class citizen: unlocking the same depth of intelligence developers already rely on for solar. We also overhauled our data infrastructure to bring in zoning ordinances and meeting minutes in real-time, straight from the web, instead of relying on scheduled scrapes. Faster, fresher, smarter.

And this November, we’re taking it up a notch.

On November 13th, we’ll be launching something big at Google’s HQ in San Francisco as part of their 10-week AI for Energy accelerator. If you’re nearby, come see it live:

🔋 BESS Reports

Users can now access AHJ-level analytics on BESS permitting, zoning, and sentiment across every active county in the U.S.

Our data also paints a picture of where America’s next wave of batteries will rise. Read the highlights:

🗺️ Sentiment Heatmaps

Spark users can now explore sentiment towards solar and BESS across all 50 states with an interactive, color-coded heatmap. At a glance, see which counties are supportive, neutral, or restrictive and click any county to open a full Spark report with the underlying data.

This one was inspired by conversations with our friends at DESRI, who are constantly pushing the frontier of what’s possible in clean energy development.

📃 Realtime Zoning Ordinances

Setbacks. Height limits. Conditional or special use permits.

They make or break projects, and interpreting them is a nightmare. So we built the engine to index every zoning ordinance in the country. Spark now pulls this data in real-time, so you’re always operating on the latest ordinance we can find.

🔎 Document Diligence

One of your favorite features, Document Diligence, just got a performance boost. Upload hundreds of files at once, each up to 50MB. Perfect for diligencing folders and finding needles in a haystack of pages.

That’s it for now, and we can’t wait for you to see what’s coming down the pipeline. Let us know how these updates are working for you, or what you’d like to see next. Reply directly to this email or schedule a time with our team. You can also reach us at [email protected] 

Till next time,

The Spark AI Team