Scott Aaronson used to look for solar opportunities by driving through Illinois, following three-phase power lines back to substations. He would telephone utilities to check what belonged to whom. Later, his firm, Demeter Land Development, hired people to scour Google Street View for wires. The lead lists could take months. This was renewable energy origination with a decidedly pre-digital working day.
A field can look perfect and still be useless. The local rules may forbid the project. Environmental constraints may shrink the buildable area. The nearest grid connection may bring costs that ruin the arithmetic. Paces, the software and services company Demeter eventually adopted, concerns itself with that awkward distance between attractive land and a project worth pursuing.
- What it does: combines parcel search, grid intelligence and permitting analysis with expert reports and development support.
- Who buys: energy developers, data center teams, powered-land developers and utilities.
- Why it matters: a rejected site can save more money than a beautifully researched bad one.
The man following the wires
Demeter’s experience supplies a concrete test of the proposition. In Paces’s published customer account, Aaronson describes incomplete datasets and mislabeled line types that forced his team to validate work it had already paid for. More leads were not much comfort when the underlying information was unreliable.
After centralizing permitting, environmental and interconnection data with Paces, Demeter says it could produce targeted lists in days and enter new markets more confidently. Its reported closing rate among interested landowners moved from one in ten to one in three. Those are land deals, not completed power plants; the distinction matters. Even so, they suggest what better screening can do for a small team’s attention.
Reported deal-closing rates in a Paces customer case. A single customer’s experience, without a controlled comparison.
“I truly don't think that we’d be able to close as many deals without Paces and their support.”
SCOTT AARONSON / DEMETER LAND DEVELOPMENT
Three noes in one day
Paces had to learn its own version of early rejection. Founded in 2022 by James McWalter and Charles Bai, it joined Y Combinator’s summer batch. The founders later told Climate Capital that three solar developers were trialing the product when all three declined to buy on the same day. There were no customers and no revenue to cushion the verdict.
Within a week, they said, they had changed their approach, relaunched and signed their first customer. The episode is a useful antidote to the polished inevitability of startup biographies. A climate mission still needs someone willing to pay for a particular problem to disappear.
McWalter had worked in data-intensive businesses including FactSet and Hello Vera. Bai had led AI efficiency work at Meta. Their initial proposition was to bring scattered zoning, grid and environmental information together so developers could make decisions faster. The task rewards a talent for cleaning inconvenient data as much as a talent for inventing algorithms.
A map acquires a workforce
The business now offers several ways to buy that help. Paces Software handles parcel searches, constraint analysis and pipeline management. Permitting Predictor interprets regulatory material. Reports provide scoped diligence or studies such as Power Flow Studies and Critical Issues Analysis. Customers can also engage development specialists for origination, site control, permitting and interconnection submissions.
Paces Agent adds automated execution across those workflows, with expert review for consequential deliverables. The company’s pitch is a combination of software, data and people. Developers can buy the software independently; teams short of capacity can purchase additional work. Its terms describe negotiated orders and prepaid credits for eligible services. The spending decision is therefore tied to scope, rather than an advertised universal ticket price.
An $11 million Series A announced in July 2024, led by Navitas Capital, financed expansion of the platform and its data capabilities. Earlier, Paces had announced a $1.9 million pre-seed led by Resolute Ventures. Named customers include EDF Renewables, AES and Third Pillar Solar. This places it in professional infrastructure development, where an analyst’s time and a stalled project both have prices.
The alternatives include LandGate’s land and energy intelligence, Transect’s environmental diligence, and a developer’s own GIS tools and consultants. Paces’s distinctive bet is to connect screening with execution in one workflow. That is a positioning choice, not proof that one vendor wins every assignment.
The cheap field with an expensive connection
The September 2026 product announcement shows how far the company has followed the problem. Transmission Line Reports assess possible routes and constraints before substantial commitments. Injection Studies forecast potential interconnection costs. A parcel’s price means rather less when connecting it requires uneconomic upgrades.
Availability deserves precision: the transmission reports opened in limited volume for early adopters; Injection Studies remained in closed beta, with wider access planned for mid-Q4. Paces says the products followed more than a year of customer requests for earlier answers. A useful map had become a demand for better investment arithmetic.
Here the boundary is consequential. Paces describes its grid insights as early-stage analysis using power-system modeling, utility data and network assumptions. A screening result cannot grant a permit or reserve grid capacity. Engineers, utilities and authorities still have decisions to make. Moving analysis earlier is valuable when its assumptions fit the project and someone can act on the findings.
Move the bad news forward
The lesson is available even without buying Paces: test the constraints that can kill a project before polishing the parts that make it attractive. Compare candidates together. Investigate the survivors more deeply. Give the team permission to abandon a promising-looking site when the evidence changes.
Paces has built a business around making that discipline easier to practice. Its appeal is wonderfully practical. The land has not changed. What changes is how long a developer spends being wrong about it.