Mapping feasible renewable transition space: Land-use, conservation, and grid-access constraints on wind and solar in British Columbia

Rapid wind and solar deployment are central to decarbonization, yet feasible deployment is shaped by energy geography: the spatial distribution of resource quality, land use, and -grid-network accessibility. Sub-national plans often rely on siting assumptions that are opaque and difficult to audit, limiting comparability and legitimate deliberation over trade-offs. We present RESource, an open-source workflow that makes siting constraints explicit and reproducible by translating land-use rules, environmental safeguards, and grid proximity into optimization-ready wind and solar supply curves. The framework integrates transparent spatial exclusions, configurable buffers, distance-based connection-cost proxies, and technology-specific hourly capacity-factor profiles under stable geospatial identifiers. Applied to British Columbia, Canada, we find that under the stated scenario assumptions conservation stringency is the dominant constraint on accessible potential. A strict-conservation policy scenario reduces accessible wind capacity by about 44% and solar by about 74% relative to baseline, whereas removing all setback buffers or imposing a 50 km grid-proximity limit changes accessible capacity by 6% or less. The results reveal pronounced spatial heterogeneity in screened costs and feasibility, with viable transition corridors concentrating in interior and northern regions where resource quality, developable land and grid access align. By making exclusions, buffers, and grid costs explicit and auditable, RESource lowers barriers for municipalities, Indigenous nations, and system planners to produce transparent siting assessments. The code and data are openly available (GitHub: https://github.com/DeltaE/RESource ; Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16658066 ).