A 300-mile transmission corridor, mapped in about a week

The challenge

The Southwest Intertie Project-North is a 500-kV transmission line running roughly 300 miles from central Nevada into south central Idaho, with capacity of up to 2,000 megawatts. Before construction could proceed, stipulations attached to a Bureau of Land Management Notice to Proceed required cultural resource studies along the route.

Studies of that kind depend on knowing who owns the land. For a corridor ten miles wide across two states, that traditionally means county-by-county research through individual assessor offices, a process measured in months, with the schedule of a multistate transmission project waiting on it.

What they did

Terracon performed the cultural resource studies, using Pivvot to assemble the land and parcel picture across the full corridor:

• ▸Corridor-wide parcel and landowner data pulled in one pass rather than county by county
• ▸A single consolidated dataset spanning both states, without reconciling separate county formats and conventions
• ▸Documentation suited to a federal review, with sources traceable for the BLM stipulations

The result

What would have taken months took roughly a week, and the cultural resource studies proceeded without the land-data step becoming the constraint on the schedule.

It also illustrates something no other siting platform can offer: the desktop analysis and the field investigation came from the same organization. Terracon performed the studies; Pivvot supplied the corridor intelligence they ran on.