The Search for the Next Power Site Begins in Orbit
A Singapore-registered startup spent the first week of June making a fairly bold argument to a room full of investors and operators: the reason so many clean energy projects never get built has less to do with money or politics than with the unglamorous business of working out where to put them.
RIFFAI, founded in 2024 by satellite data specialist Kolatat Katousano, took that pitch to Echelon Singapore on 3 and 4 June at Suntec Singapore, where it appeared within the Shinhan Square Bridge Ecosystem showcase as a GeoAI and space-tech name working the energy beat. Its claim is simple enough to fit on a slide and awkward enough to keep developers up at night. Early-stage siting, the company says, is where promising renewable schemes quietly die.
That’s a message worth taking seriously, because site selection sits at the very front of the infrastructure pipeline, long before a turbine is ordered or a grid connection is filed. Get it wrong and the costs compound, with wasted survey budgets, stranded land options and timelines that slip past the point where the economics still work.
RIFFAI’s wager is that satellite imagery, fed through machine learning, can shrink that risk to something developers and lenders can actually price. For an industry under pressure to deploy capital faster and decarbonise on a deadline, the idea that better answers are floating overhead carries obvious appeal.
Briefing
- RIFFAI, a Singapore-registered satellite and AI startup founded in 2024, showcased its energy-siting platform at Echelon Singapore on 3 and 4 June 2026.
- Its core pitch is that poor early-stage site search and selection, not capital alone, is what stalls many renewable projects before construction begins.
- The platform applies machine learning to hyper-multispectral satellite data to identify, evaluate and rank sites for solar farms, onshore and offshore wind, and hyperscale data centres.
- The market backdrop is moving fast, with satellite-based renewable siting valued at around USD 1.42 billion in 2024 and forecast to grow at a double-digit annual rate through 2033.
- Founder Kolatat Katousano frames energy as a starting point, with longer-term ambitions spanning agriculture, climate, security and transportation.
The Bottleneck Nobody Puts In The Budget
Developers rarely advertise how much of a renewable project’s fate is sealed before the first spade goes in. Land suitability, irradiance, wind behaviour, flood exposure, proximity to grid infrastructure and a tangle of environmental constraints all have to line up, and the conventional way of checking them still leans heavily on registry maps, manual inspections and the occasional site visit.
Those methods were never built for the pace the energy transition now demands, and they tend to surface problems late, when changing course is expensive. RIFFAI’s framing is that this front-end inefficiency is the single biggest reason good projects fall over, a view echoed by analysts who note that traditional planning workflows simply cannot keep up with the volume of sites the sector wants to assess.
The commercial logic follows from there. If a developer can screen hundreds of candidate locations remotely and rank them by viability before committing survey teams, the cost of a dud falls sharply and the best sites rise to the top faster. That matters most in markets where land is contested, data is patchy or projects need to clear environmental scrutiny that can drag on for months.
RIFFAI positions its tools as a way to move organisations from reactive firefighting toward proactive planning, which is the sort of language lenders like to hear when they’re weighing construction risk. The harder question, and one the company will need to keep answering, is whether automated screening holds up against the messy realities of permitting and community consent that no satellite can photograph.
Turning Pixels Into Decisions
At the technical core sits the ability to convert dense satellite imagery into something a planner can act on. RIFFAI works with hyper-multispectral data and machine learning models to detect environmental changes, flag risks and support longer-term planning with what it describes as greater accuracy.
Beyond site hunting, the company says it has deployed a command and control system that lets energy firms manage operations remotely and handle time-sensitive missions in real time, extending its reach from the planning phase into live asset oversight. That breadth, covering identification, evaluation and prioritisation of sites for solar, onshore and offshore wind, plus hyperscale data centres, is what RIFFAI is selling as a single intelligence layer rather than a one-trick screening tool.
Katousano has been keen to position the technology as part of everyday operational kit rather than a research curiosity. “We are seeing new generations of satellite data process and space influence on industry-agnostic applications that will help us understand intelligence decision making in planetary scale,” he said. He has also framed the shift in plainer terms for a commercial audience, noting that “Satellites used to be something far above our heads, but these insights from space are becoming a practical part of everyday decision-making for commercial and civilian applications.” The pitch, in other words, is that orbital data has crossed from novelty into infrastructure, and that the firms learning to use it now will set the pace for those that follow.
A Market Climbing Faster Than Most Realise
The numbers behind the category give RIFFAI’s timing some credibility. The market for satellite-based renewable energy siting was put at roughly USD 1.42 billion in 2024 and is forecast to expand at around 13.7 per cent a year through 2033, when it could reach the USD 4.1 billion mark. The wider earth observation opportunity is larger still, with the World Economic Forum estimating that the sector could add a cumulative 3.8 trillion dollars to the global economy between 2023 and 2030 as AI lowers the cost of turning imagery into insight. Asia Pacific is the region tipped to grow fastest for satellite data services, which puts a Singapore base in a useful spot.
It’s also a crowded spot. The established names in earth observation, including Maxar Technologies, Planet Labs, ICEYE, Capella Space and BlackSky, already command serious capacity and capital, and independent profiles list Planet, Capella and ICEYE among RIFFAI’s closest comparators.
The startup’s edge, if it has one, won’t come from owning satellites but from the analytics layer that sits on top of third-party data, which is where a small team with deep domain focus can move quickly. RIFFAI is recorded as an early-stage, as-yet unfunded venture, so the gap between ambition and balance sheet is real, and investors at events like Echelon will be watching whether the company can convert showcase interest into paying energy clients before the runway runs short.
Data Centres Quietly Join The Queue
One detail in RIFFAI’s target list deserves more attention than it usually gets, and that’s hyperscale data centres. The same screening logic that suits solar and wind applies neatly to the facilities now driving a surge in electricity demand, where developers must weigh land, power availability, cooling, connectivity and climate exposure all at once.
Siting a data centre badly is an expensive mistake, and the boom in AI compute has made the supply of suitable locations a genuine constraint in several markets, Singapore among them. Folding that use case into an energy-siting platform is a shrewd commercial move, since it links the company to two of the decade’s biggest infrastructure stories at the same time.
The connection runs deeper than convenience. Data centres and renewables are increasingly planned together, with operators chasing clean power to meet sustainability commitments and grid operators trying to manage where heavy new loads land. A tool that can assess renewable potential and data centre suitability on the same map speaks directly to the integrated planning that utilities, hyperscalers and governments are all edging toward.
Whether RIFFAI’s models are mature enough to carry that weight is unproven, but the framing shows the company understands where the infrastructure money is heading.
The Road From Energy To Almost Everything
For all the talk of a planetary-scale platform, RIFFAI’s stated strategy is deliberately narrow at the outset. “To move toward this vision, we are starting with a focused strategy. Today, we are building deep domain expertise in the energy sector, helping countries and companies identify renewable resources, optimize infrastructure planning, and accelerate transition more efficiently toward sustainable systems,” Katousano said. The longer arc he describes points at a future where satellite intelligence becomes a kind of invisible infrastructure underpinning daily decisions across energy, agriculture, climate, security and transportation, as ordinary and as widely available as internet connectivity.
Getting there will lean on three things the company has flagged: scalable AI models, integration across multiple satellite sources rather than reliance on any single constellation, and global data partnerships that let the platform work across very different geographies. Each of those is a sensible building block, and each is also a tall order for an unfunded startup competing against far larger players.
RIFFAI has identified a real and costly problem, has a plausible technical answer to part of it, and now faces the unforgiving job of proving the model pays its way in the field rather than on a conference stage.
What It Signals For The Build Pipeline
The bigger story sitting behind one startup’s appearance at a Singapore tech event is the steady migration of orbital data into mainstream infrastructure decision-making. Site selection has long been treated as a soft, judgement-led stage of project development, and the move to quantify it with satellite imagery and machine learning hints at a future where the earliest planning calls are as data-rich as the engineering that follows.
Funding, regulatory acceptance and the practical limits of remote screening will all shape who wins. What’s clear is that the question RIFFAI is asking, namely whether the search for the next power site should start from space, is one the infrastructure industry can no longer afford to wave away.
