Salesforce for Renewable Energy and Energy Storage: Projects, Members and Maps

Storage, solar and wind on one site: the mix a renewable energy organization has to keep track of. Image: Canva, with the Brazen Group logo and Salesforce Partner badge added by us.

A renewable energy organization runs on many moving parts: projects at different stages across many sites, partners and installers, members or investors to keep informed, permits and documents, and boards or funders who want numbers. When each of those lives in its own spreadsheet or inbox, the people who should be moving projects forward spend their time assembling status updates instead.

This guide is for the people who own that problem: founders, program and project managers, and membership leads at energy developers, installers and storage consortia. It explains what Salesforce offers the sector, the three jobs worth giving it first, four ways to put your ecosystem on a map, and what we learned building the ArcGIS-powered ecosystem map for NY-BEST.

Where Energy Organizations Lose Time Without One System

These are the situations we hear most often from energy developers, installers and consortia. None of them is dramatic, which is why they last for years:

• Project status lives in people’s heads. Which project is waiting on a permit, which on engineering, which on a customer? Answering takes a round of emails.
• Partners and members are in several lists. A directory in one file, contacts in another, event signups in a third, each a little out of date.
• Documents are scattered. Permits, designs and agreements sit in shared drives, with no link back to the project they belong to.
• Reports are rebuilt by hand. Every board meeting or funder update starts from a blank spreadsheet.
• Your network is invisible. A consortium’s greatest asset is who is in it and where, but it is hard to show on a page.

What Salesforce Offers Renewable Energy and Storage Organizations

Salesforce’s industry product is Energy & Utilities Cloud, which Salesforce says serves “electric, gas and water utilities, retail energy suppliers and renewable energy companies.” Among the capabilities it lists are work and asset management with automated work orders, configure-price-quote for energy and utilities, order management, and clean energy program management with contractor portals.

Many organizations in this sector do not start there. They start with the core clouds and add industry features when a specific need calls for them:

• One CRM for relationships and pipeline. Organizations, contacts, projects and opportunities together in Sales Cloud, with the history of every conversation.
• Portals for members, partners and the public. Profiles, directories and submissions on Experience Cloud, each audience seeing only what is theirs.
• Automation for the steps no one should chase. Tasks, approvals and handoffs between design, engineering and field teams, built with Flow.
• Dashboards from live data. Pipeline, stage times and bottlenecks, available to everyone who needs them without a rebuild.
• AI with a person in the loop. Drafted status updates and answers to routine questions, reviewed by your team. See Agentforce AI and Claude.

Three Jobs to Give Salesforce First

Trying to move everything at once is the surest way to stall. Pick the job that costs you the most today, finish it, and let the rest follow:

1. 1Projects, from design to permit and installation. Every project in one pipeline, with stages, tasks, owners, due dates and documents attached. Required steps are completed before a project can move on, and every stage change is recorded.
2. 2The ecosystem of members and partners. Organizations, contacts and relationships in one place, with membership levels, renewals and events. A portal lets members keep their own profiles current, so the directory maintains itself.
3. 3Reporting for boards and funders. Reports built on the same live data, so the next update is a view, not a project. Access by role keeps each audience to its own numbers.

Putting Your Ecosystem on a Map: Four Ways to Do It

Energy is geographic, so a map is often the clearest way to show a network of projects, members or suppliers. Esri, the company behind ArcGIS, sets out how ArcGIS and Salesforce can work together. In practice the choice comes down to four routes:

• Salesforce Maps. Esri describes it as providing “basic mapping, territory design and route optimization within Salesforce,” built with the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript. It suits sales and field teams working their own territories and routes.
• An ArcGIS web app embedded in Salesforce. Esri notes this can be done in several ways, including an Apex pattern, so the page can respond to the Salesforce record it sits on.
• A data pipeline. Scheduled or on-demand transfers that pull Salesforce data into ArcGIS, when the analysis happens in ArcGIS and Salesforce is the source of record.
• A custom map component. A map built into Salesforce with ArcGIS map tiles and a Lightning web component, which is the route we took for NY-BEST.

Three questions decide which route fits:

• Who looks at it? Your own staff, your members, or anyone on the internet? A public map has to work without a login or a per-user licence.
• Who edits the data? If members submit and update their own entries, you need a portal and an approval step before anything appears publicly.
• How will it grow? A map that works for 100 points should still work, and cost about the same, at 1,000.

What We Learned Building the NY-BEST Ecosystem Map

NY-BEST, a battery and energy storage technology alliance, needed a public-facing global resource database and an interactive map of the energy storage supply chain. The brief, as published in the case study, asked for 1,000+ points across the supply chain, dynamic filtering by industry type, category and geography, ongoing member submissions with an approval workflow, and a public experience that would not carry per-user or per-request costs as it grew.

Brazen Group evaluated the mapping options and built a custom solution on ArcGIS tiles, integrated with Salesforce: Apex controllers, Lightning Web Components and the Leaflet library, secured with Lightning Web Security and published through an Experience Cloud portal. The case study reports:

• $20,000 to $30,000 in annual savings compared with the recurring licence routes considered.
• A map that stays scalable as the ecosystem grows, with advanced filtering and fast performance.
• A secure member portal where the ecosystem keeps itself current, with approval before anything is published.

Read the full NY-BEST case study, or see how we approach Salesforce integration and maps.

Running Projects on Salesforce, and Keeping It Running

The same approach works inside a project business. Sologistics manages its design, engineering and permitting workflows on a Salesforce system built by Brazen Group, which has supported it ever since. The point is not the tool; it is that the people running projects see the same status the people managing them do.

What happens after go-live decides whether a system stays useful. New projects, new partners and new reporting needs arrive constantly, so plan for ongoing Salesforce managed services from the start: a response within 15 minutes for critical issues and within 24 hours for everything else, seven days a week.

How a Salesforce Project for an Energy Organization Runs

A good implementation takes you from today’s spreadsheets to a live system in clear steps, with the people who will use it involved from the start:

1. 1Discovery. How projects, members and partners are tracked today, who needs which view, and every tool the new system must connect to.
2. 2Data and process design. The project stages, the data model for organizations and relationships, and who owns each field.
3. 3Portal and map design. What members, partners and the public can see, submit and edit, and how submissions are approved before they appear.
4. 4Build and test with your team. Configuration, automation and integrations, tested against real projects and real members.
5. 5Pilot, then roll out. One project type or member group first, then the rest, with training before each go-live.
6. 6Run and improve. Monitoring, fixes and new features, with ongoing support if you want it.

See how we deliver Salesforce for renewable energy and energy storage, part of our work for the wider public sector and energy sector.

Salesforce for Renewable Energy and Storage: FAQ