What does project development cost you without Plume?
Prospecting, due diligence, grid connection, territorial and competitive monitoring, portfolio prioritization. Estimate what Plume saves each role on your team, based on calls with about sixty French renewable developers. Every assumption is shown and sourced.
Your organization
Defaults: a typical developer seen in calls (5 project managers analyzing 6 sites a month each, 1 GIS FTE, 40 signed lease promises a year). The impact updates below.
Impact for each role
back in the field per project manager. A site analysis goes from several days of waiting to a few minutes, with no GIS ticket.
- Hours saved, team / yr
- 983 h
- Site analysis
- 405 h
- Monitoring
- 322 h
- Grid connection research
- 256 h
of zones, maps and exports that no longer go through the GIS team. QGIS and criteria governance stay with you.
- GIS time reallocated
- 0.5 FTE
- Licenses replaced
- 30 k€
- Project manager hours in self-service
- 661 h
- Time + licenses value
- 59 k€
for 72 k€ of subscription. A single late abandonment avoided covers the subscription.
- ROI
- +321 %
- Payback
- 2.8 months
- Projects saved / yr
- 3
- GIS FTE equivalent
- 5.2
More than 60% of the gain comes from projects saved, whose frequency is an assumption. Compare with the conservative view.
Where the gain comes from
| Line | Hours | € / yr |
|---|---|---|
| A. Time savings | €73,235 | |
| Site analysis | 405 h | €18,225 |
| Monitoring | 322 h | €14,490 |
| Grid connection research | 256 h | €11,520 |
| GIS time reallocated | 800 h | €29,000 |
| B. Avoided costs | €230,000 | |
| Licenses replaced | €30,000 | |
| Projects on a saturated substation avoided | €100,000 | |
| Late abandonments avoided | €100,000 | |
| Total | €303,235 | |
Our assumptions and their sources
S: sourced (customer quote or public source). E: estimated from 1 to 3 quotes. H: working assumption, to validate in a pilot.
| Assumption | Value | Source | Conf. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loaded hourly cost of a project manager | 45 €/h | €50k gross (2025 job ads: €40-60k) × 1.45 employer costs / 1,600 h | E |
| Loaded yearly cost of a GIS FTE | 58 k€ | €40k gross × 1.45. In calls: “€5,000 a month is one full-time person” (two developers, June and July 2026) | E |
| Time saved on a site analysis | −75 % | “four times, five times faster” (CEO of a solar developer, Sept. 2025); verdict in about 30 min on Plume | S |
| Share of GIS time reallocated to higher-value work | 50 % | No customer figure; 2 h of sorting for 104 zones, zones delivered in 2 months, requests “all the time” in an 8-person GIS team | H |
| Time saved on monitoring | −70 % | Frequency sourced (daily check of 20 projects; 2 days of opinion synthesis down to 5 min), rate not measured | H |
| Grid research hours per signed promise, time saved | 8 h, −80 % | “several hours” of grid operator filters (confirmed by a grid connection engineer) | H |
| Cost of a project stopped after the grid offer | 50 k€ | €50,000 grid offer quoted by three storage and solar developers (2025-2026) | S |
| Cost of a project stopped after studies | 100 k€ | €100k of wildlife studies (energy company, June 2025); €100-150k of studies for a 50 MW project (solar developer, May 2026) | S |
| Share of late stops avoided with Plume | 50 % | “it would have been good to know 6 months earlier”; need for 6 to 10 months of lead over competitors. Rate not measured | H |
| Signed lease promises per year (default) | 40 | About 60 a year at three developers interviewed; cross-checked with Plume data: median of about 5 projects a year reaching the environmental authority among target developers, with 1 promise in 5 to 10 getting there | E |
| Share of promises blocked by grid after the grid offer (default) | 10 % | “more than 50% of projects” without a solution (solar developer, 150 projects); “90% is saturated” (storage developer); but a minority of promises reach the grid offer | E |
| Projects abandoned late per year (default) | 2 | Cases quoted (zoning change found 3 months before filing; 3 months lost on a zoning document; 130 MW lost in the queue despite land and permit), no yearly count | H |
What developers say
“We find the same thing four times faster, five times faster.”
“In 5 minutes, I had the 2 days of work spent collecting and summarizing the opinions.”
“When we wanted to prospect a zone, we asked the GIS team and waited three, four months.”
“He put €50,000 on the table, requested a grid offer and got one.”
“More than 50% of our projects would be told there is no solution in time for the grid plan revision.”
“Spending €100,000 on wildlife studies and finding out after 6 months the zone is no longer eligible: it would have been good to know 6 months earlier.”
Orders of magnitude, not a quote. Figures depend on your organization, technologies and region. A Plume pilot measures three indicators before and after: time per site, GIS request delay, monitoring hours. Anonymized quotes from calls between June 2025 and October 2026.