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3 Geospatial Analysis and Scoring of Sites <br />Barr performed a geospatial analysis of the landfill sites in the CLP and ranked their potential for solar <br />development. The following subsections describe the data sources and the ranking methodology and <br />present the results. <br />3.1 Data Sources <br />To identify potential data sources, we reviewed the comprehensive list of criteria developed during our <br />outreach to stakeholders in Task 1. With these criteria in mind we assembled publicly available sources of <br />geographical information system (GIS) data sets and using ESRI's ArcGIS created a GIS tool to analyze the <br />sites. The list of GIS data sets are as follows: <br />• LMA — MPCA. Received via email on February 6, 2020. <br />• Waste Footprints — MPCA. Received via email on February 6, 2020. <br />• Bond Restricted Parcels — MPCA. Received via email on March 20, 2020. <br />• National Wetland Inventory within the LMAs — Minnesota Department of Natural Resources <br />(reference (2)). <br />• Elevation contours — derived from MnGEO LiDAR data (reference (3)) <br />• Electric substations — Minnesota Electric Transmission Mapping Project (reference (4)) <br />• Electric transmission lines — Minnesota Electric Transmission Mapping Project (reference (4)) <br />• Land Cover — National Land Cover Database (reference (5)) <br />3.2 Criteria <br />To facilitate ranking our focus centered on four important criteria where we could identify GIS data for <br />each criterion or could complete straightforward calculations to create a data set that could be scored for <br />each CLP site. Each criterion is described in detail below: <br />• Landfill cap generation potential in MW <br />• Buffer generation potential in MW <br />• Total site solar generation potential in MW <br />• Distance to the nearest substation (miles) <br />Landfill cap generation potential represents the solar capacity of the portion of the site where waste is <br />managed and covered with an engineered cap. This is an important criterion because solar construction <br />on landfill caps presents some unique challenges when compared to greenfield solar development. The <br />landfill cap is designed to prevent water from percolating through waste material and creating <br />contamination issues in local ground water. For this reason, penetrations are not allowed, and solar <br />developers will use ballasted racking systems and equipment with lower ground pressure ratings when <br />constructing solar on landfill caps. To refine the available construction acreage on each cap we used our <br />GIS system to identify slopes greater than 15% and we subtracted these steeply sloped areas from total <br />cap acreages reported by our GIS system. Thus, we created a "buildable area" in acres for each landfill cap. <br />To calculate the generating potential for each landfill cap we divided each buildable area in acres by a <br />