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LiDAR Surveying for
Renewable Energy
From vast wind farm ridgelines to utility-scale solar farms, hydropower watersheds, and offshore wind developments — renewable energy projects in the Philippines demand precise, large-scale spatial data at every stage. AB Surveying and Development provides aerial, bathymetric, and terrestrial LiDAR surveys purpose-built for the scale and complexity of renewable energy development — delivering the terrain models, offshore bathymetric coverage, and regulatory-ready datasets your project needs from initial site identification through pre-development ECC and into detailed design and engineering.
Challenges we solve
Renewable energy developers and engineers face unique terrain, vegetation, and data challenges. Here's how high-accuracy LiDAR surveying directly addresses them.
Challenges
Renewable energy site selection requires terrain data across vast candidate areas that ground surveys can't cover efficiently
Remote wind energy sites are difficult and expensive to survey conventionally
How LiDAR Helps
Renewable energy site identification — whether for wind farms, solar farms, or hydropower — requires evaluating terrain across large candidate areas, often in remote, elevated, or heavily vegetated locations where ground survey is impractical and satellite-derived elevation data lacks the resolution for meaningful engineering analysis. Wind farm site identification in particular requires accurate ridgeline profiles and exposure analysis across extensive areas before any single site warrants detailed investment. Aerial LiDAR surveys cover vast areas efficiently, producing sub-meter terrain models that reveal ridgeline profiles, slope gradients, vegetation height, solar exposure, and access constraints — enabling developers to compare and rank candidate sites with confidence before committing to feasibility study investment.
Airborne LiDAR surveys cover hundreds of hectares per flight day, penetrating canopy to deliver bare-earth models of even the most rugged terrain. Wind turbine siting and access road design can proceed with full confidence in the underlying topography.
Offshore wind farm surveys require seamless land-to-seabed coverage that conventional methods can't provide
Offshore wind farm development in the Philippines requires spatial data that spans the onshore-to-offshore transition seamlessly — from grid connection points and onshore cable routes, through the intertidal zone, to the seabed where turbine foundations will be installed. Combining conventional hydrographic survey with terrestrial topographic methods at this interface is slow, costly, and frequently produces data that doesn't integrate cleanly across the land-sea boundary. Aerial Bathymetric LiDAR surveys this entire transition zone in a single integrated acquisition — delivering a seamless dataset that supports offshore wind farm feasibility, cable route optimization, and foundation engineering without the data gap that conventional combined surveys leave at the shoreline.
Solar farm layout and drainage design suffer when terrain data misses micro-topographic detail
Solar farm designs built on coarse topographic data routinely encounter micro-terrain features during construction that weren't visible in satellite imagery or conventional surveys — drainage channels bisecting proposed panel arrays, slope variations that affect foundation design, and low-lying areas that pond during rainfall. These discoveries mid-construction drive expensive redesigns and delays. Aerial LiDAR penetrates vegetation canopy to reveal the exact bare-earth surface of solar farm sites, giving designers the terrain accuracy they need to optimize panel placement, calculate precise grading volumes, and design drainage systems that work — before a single pile is driven.
Vegetation and land cover analysis is slow when done manually
LiDAR point clouds distinguish ground, low vegetation, shrubs, and tree canopy automatically. Combined with orthophoto overlays, our teams deliver classified land cover maps that fast-track environmental baseline studies and clearing cost estimates.
LiDAR Surveying Applications in Renewable Energy
Across all renewable energy types and project stages — from prefeasibility to operations — LiDAR data delivers measurable advantages.
Solar Farm Site Assessment
Terrain analysis for optimal panel placement, slope grading, shadow modeling, and drainage design for utility-scale solar farms.
Hydropower Watershed & Bathymetric Survey
Aerial LiDAR watershed delineation, flow modeling, and Bathymetric LiDAR reservoir volume estimation for run-of-river and storage hydropower feasibility and detailed design.
Transmission Line Route Planning
Aerial LiDAR corridor surveys for power evacuation infrastructure — connecting onshore and offshore wind farms, solar facilities, and hydro plants to the Philippine grid safely and efficiently.
Offshore Wind Farm Survey
Aerial Bathymetric LiDAR survey of offshore wind farm sites in Philippine waters — delivering seamless land-to-seabed topographic and bathymetric coverage for offshore wind farm site assessment, cable route design, and turbine foundation engineering.
Wind Energy Site Mapping
High-resolution terrain models for turbine placement, access road routing, and tower foundation engineering in ridgeline and coastal wind sites.
Topographic Survey for Feasibility Study
Survey-grade LiDAR topographic datasets formatted for renewable energy feasibility studies — meeting DOE, DENR, and project lender spatial data requirements for wind farm, solar farm, hydro, and geothermal projects.
Pre-development ECC Spatial Data Support
Survey-grade LiDAR datasets with documentation formatted for pre-development Environmental Compliance Certificate applications to DENR for wind farm, solar, hydro, and geothermal projects.
Flood Simulation & Drainage Design
LiDAR-derived hydrological models for renewable energy site drainage design — identifying flood risk, simulating inundation scenarios, and designing site drainage for wind farm and solar project developments.
What Our Clients Get:
3D Colorised Point Cloud Data
A point cloud data containing millions of precisely located points overlaid with orthophoto RGB creating a realistic 3D city model.
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
A developer planning the country's largest solar project — a 3,500 MW facility — needed survey-grade topographic data fast enough to keep financing milestones, right-of-way decisions, and EPC mobilization on track. ABSD deployed a manned aircraft with survey-grade LiDAR and completed acquisition of the entire 7,932-hectare site in just a couple of flight days, delivering a full design-ready package — DTM, DSM, contours, and orthophoto — in approximately 30 calendar days from notice to proceed.
Critically, ABSD scoped the survey beyond the fence line to include surrounding drainage catchments and access corridors, eliminating the need for a second mobilization when hydrology and routing questions arose downstream. The validated surfaces allowed the engineering team to finalize grading, drainage, and array layout against real ground conditions, reducing design loops, sharpening procurement quantities, and giving the developer a confident, defensible dataset for lender conversations.
AREA SURVEYED
7,932 ha.
DATA ACQUISITION
2 days
AREA SURVEYED
30 days
Our Services
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We were amazed at how fast AB Surveying and Development's LiDAR mapping was as compared to conventional surveying methods.
With approximately 1,000 hectares of land area, the Kiangan, Ifugao project site was accurately generated as a topographic map and was very useful for the planning and design of the proposed Hucab Mini Hydro Electric Plant. The team was very accommodating and helpful in every step of the way, and they almost eliminated the need for physical site inspection because of their attention to detail!
Highly recommended to all our industry peers!
Patrick Talibon, Business Line Manager, Pacific Tech Solutions, Inc.