Developing a spatially informed energy security strategy for a global retailer

The stakes were significant. The retailer deploys billions of dollars annually to open new sites, and as the business expands, electricity demand across its portfolio could increase nearly 50% by 2035. At the same time, increasingly limited clean energy availability was complicating efforts to meet corporate sustainability targets. 

Despite the urgency, the company faced several structural barriers to solving the problem internally: 

Our approach

Earth Finance partnered with the retailer to assess energy risks across existing and planned sites, quantify their financial impacts on the business, and develop a resilience strategy to address them. The work combined econometric modeling with geospatial analytics from , Earth Finance’s geospatial intelligence platform built on Google Cloud.

1) Establishing energy data governance. The first phase focused on aligning internal processes and improving how energy information flowed across teams. Energy risk sits at the intersection of real estate, construction, sustainability, and energy procurement. Historically, these groups worked in siloes, which meant electricity constraints were often discovered after the site had already been selected.

We worked with the organization to redesign this process so that energy data could be introduced earlier, allowing teams to proactively manage electricity supply, price, and carbon risk.

2) Analyzing site-level energy risk across the portfolio. The next phase assessed energy security risks across the company’s real estate footprint, covering hundreds of existing and planned sites. To support this work, we doubled the SpatiaFi data catalogue to include 500+ energy-related geospatial layers across the United States. These included electricity prices, grid reliability data, transmission expansion forecasts, data center-driven electricity demand, regional power generation trends, and more.

Using these datasets, we developed a scoring framework that evaluated each site across 3 dimensions: 

• Energy price risk evaluated how electricity costs may change over time based on regional market trends and projected generation costs.
• Energy supply risk: captured whether electricity would be available where and when it was needed using indicators such as outage frequency, reserve margin risk, transmission adequacy, and data center competition.
• Carbon risk: assessed whether sites could access low-carbon electricity from the grid today and how that trajectory might change through 2035.

Together, these indicators produced a site-level energy security profile that could be compared across the company’s entire real estate footprint. For example, our analysis revealed that over 2/3rds of planned sites are exposed to medium or high electricity price risk.