The First National Highway ROW Energy Dataset
The traditional view of the roadside right-of-way (ROW) is evolving from an underleveraged transportation land-use network to a critical component of the national energy grid. By validating the first comprehensive dataset of its kind, The Ray has firmly established itself as a nonprofit leader and principal ROW expert advancing colocation innovation in traditionally disparate fields of energy and mobility. This project marks a shift from regional demonstrations to a nationwide strategy, providing the technical expertise and cutting-edge geospatial tools needed to transform underutilized public lands into shovel-ready strategies for siting and permitting energy projects.
The crowning achievement of 2025 was the completion of detailed ROW data for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., in partnership with the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) ROWER project to assess the suitability of energy generation projects on the highway ROW. The NLR bridges research and real-world applications to advance energy technologies that lower costs, boost the economy, strengthen security, and ensure an abundant energy supply. This foundation-setting work serves as a technical catalyst, unlocking future energy deployment by identifying viable corridors across the entire National Highway System (NHS).
"The development of our advanced ROW mapping and analysis tools marks a critical turning point for highway administration. For decades, the question of why these lands weren't already being leveraged for their highest public use persisted due to a lack of high-fidelity, digitized data. Consequently, state agencies face bureaucratic permitting issues and uncertainty because they cannot easily visualize these corridors for colocation services.” —Allie Kelly, Executive Director
Mapping the Future, Funding the Grid
By providing these data-driven insights, The Ray has removed this primary barrier to entry, allowing transportation and utility partners to identify optimal paths for energy infrastructure with unprecedented precision. Last year, this state-based application was implemented in Arizona, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Washington, providing ROW suitability analyses for the DOTs for energy infrastructure and policy development.
The future implications of this work extend far beyond a static map. By treating the ROW as a national strategic asset, The Ray is paving the way forward to establish the technical and regulatory framework to support a modernized national energy grid. This data is already yielding tangible results in the policy arena, directly informing legislative or regulatory actions in Iowa, Washington, and California to identify highway ROW as potential energy corridors. As we move toward 2026, the Geospatial Solutions team is expanding this data-driven stewardship model to ensure the nation’s infrastructure is prepared for the complex, exponential, long-term energy demands of the future.
The year 2025 marked a turning point. The highway ROW is now officially recognized as a national strategic asset. Through multi-agency collaboration and the integration of DOT, energy, and tech sectors, The Ray has set the stage for a transformative 2026. By moving in parallel with energy stakeholders and mirroring the success of our transportation work, we are unlocking the passive capacity of our roadsides.
The numbers speak for themselves—nearly 1.7 million acres of suitable land identified, representing a solar potential of over 225,000 MW. At an estimated energy value of $62.4 trillion per year, we aren't just mapping the future of the grid; we are providing the high-fidelity blueprint to fund and fuel it.