Our own product
Site intelligence for Irish battery storage developers
A product we design, build and run: grid capacity, planning history, land and environmental risk for every substation in Ireland, scored A to F in one map.
- Client
- BESS Map
- Period
- March 2026 to present
- Our role
- Founder: design, build and operate
Why it exists
Finding a viable site for a battery storage project in Ireland meant cross-checking ESB heatmaps, 31 planning portals, EirGrid PDFs and property listings by hand. BESS Map puts all of that on one map and ranks every substation, so a developer gets a documented shortlist in minutes rather than weeks.
What is under the map
Twenty-two ingest and scraper pipelines feed a PostgreSQL and PostGIS database: ESB substation headroom, the national planning database and decision notices, NPWS designations, OPW flood zones, EPA land, GSI soils, EirGrid constraints, OpenStreetMap, a digital elevation model for slope, and land listings from seven agents.
The scoring engine weights substation capacity, planning precedent, land cost and environmental risk, then adds curtailment, dwellings, obstacles, peat, refusal rates, road access and slope. Any environmental intersection sets a site to zero. A precomputed cache refreshed by Vercel cron brought the ranked list from about two minutes to about 50 ms.
Product and engineering
The app is Next.js 16 on Vercel's Dublin region, with MapLibre for the map, React PDF for site reports, Resend for alert digests and PostHog for analytics. An AI analyst built on the Claude API answers questions, moves the map through tool calls and drafts the narrative in each dossier, and a vision pipeline reads planning decision notices.
The MVP shipped two days after the first commit. Since then the product has taken more than 1,000 commits across 47 planned phases, and access is now arranged per company rather than self-serve.
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