2026 study Utopia

A state in a second

Alabama is 33.5 million acres. Here it is cut into 1,300,904 H3 cells of about 26 acres, and every one of them goes through the screen below. Armondo Energies is a fictitious demo; every layer is public data.

Each rule is a question a client asks on day one: is it in the floodplain, how close are the homes, is it too steep, how far is the grid. This browser answers all of them for the whole state in about a second, and again on every change. The same screen runs on one county or on all 48 states; only the file changes.

Alabama--

Passes every rule--

And within 2 mi of 115 kV and up--

Largest contiguous block--

Last statewide run--

Loading the cells

What are you siting?

The Phoebus screen from Day 03: homes 300 ft, roads 66 ft, slope under 15 percent, within 2 mi of 115 kV and up. Total passing acres is the number to read.

Rules

FEMA floodplain plus 50 ft

Streams 75 ft

Waterbodies 75 ft

Structures 300 ft

Roads 66 ft

Railroad 100 ft

Gas pipeline 100 ft

Protected areas (PAD-US)

Slope at or over Area rules fail a cell over

Grid

Distance to a line2.0 mi

Line at or over

Scale

This file, Alabama: --
One county, Marengo: --
The lower 48, estimated: --

Bites, statewide

Rule	Alone	In order

Cell

Click a cell for its row.

Assumptions

Assumed: a cell fails a setback when any part of it is within the distance, so one house corner fails 26 acres. The cell screen is conservative by design.
Assumed: the floodplain works as a setback from the FEMA SFHA, 0 ft inside it, so any SFHA in a cell fails it. PAD-US and slope fail a cell only when more than the share limit of it is excluded (10 percent by default).
Assumed: preset values are starting points and every one stays a slider. Preset values from: NREL, Sergi et al., EPRI seminar slide 10 (May 8, 2025), national median wind setback from buildings of 2.0 x tip height; City of Hermiston OR conceptual development plan, Table 1, data center sites of 100 ac and up on 0 to 5 percent slope outside the SFHA (search excerpt read 2026-10-30; the document returned 404); MSU Quello Center, Data Center Community Assessment (June 2026), 200 contiguous ac and up for hyperscale; Bolinger and Bolinger, LBNL (2022), 0.24 MWdc per ac for tracking solar.
Assumed: roads and rail at 500 ft for wind, and 1 mi to 230 kV and up for a data center, are our values; no public numeric standard for either was found. Distance to a line stands in for substation capacity, which no public layer gives.
Inferred: streams are NHD stream, river, artificial path and canal lines, waterbodies are lakes, ponds and reservoirs, as on Day 03. PAD-US counts fee, easement and designation; proclamation lines are left out because they wrap private land.
Inferred: HIFLD lines from 66 to 99 kV count as the 69 kV class; inactive and proposed lines are left out.
Estimated: the lower 48 line scales this file by land area (about 1.9 billion acres, Census) over the mean cell, at this file's bytes per cell. Nothing at that extent has been built.
Demand behind the data center preset: Southern Company reported 17 GW of contracted large load (Utility Dive, Aug 4, 2026).
Distances are measured in EPSG:5070, equal area, with a scale error under about 1 percent in Alabama.

Method

The screen runs at H3 resolution 9 cells, about 26 acres each. PostGIS measured, for every cell, the distance from any part of the cell to each feature class (one indexed ST_DWithin and nearest-neighbor pass per class, capped one foot past each slider), the share of the cell in the SFHA and PAD-US, and the share of 10 m slope pixels over 5, 10, 15 and 20 percent, so every slider position is exact. The page reads the 25 MB Parquet by HTTP range request into DuckDB-WASM and reruns one SQL CASE over every row on every change; the query is below. deck.gl 9.2.2 draws the cells with H3HexagonLayer on WebGL; its WebGPU path arrives in 9.4, so there is no WebGPU switch here. The largest block is a union-find over each cell's six stored neighbors in a Web Worker, kept to cells inside the ring.

Pass, in ring Pass, outside Fails a rule Largest block Its county Floodplain biteStreams biteWaterbodies bitePAD-US biteStructures biteRoads biteRailroad bitePipeline biteSlope bite