pv magazine Webinar | What gets missed when solar design narrows too early

From the initial stages of identifying land and available grid capacity, PV projects often move quickly into detailed system design. This can narrow the options very early in the process, and lead to missed opportunities for optimization. In this pv magazine Webinar, we examine common approaches to project design and introduce a strategy that can ensure more options are properly explored before committing.

From the very beginning of a PV project, engineers are faced with a wealth of decisions. Making the best use of available land and grid capacity will influence target DC size, racking, pitch and ground coverage ratio, inverter loading, storage scenarios, these are just a few.

And all of these early decisions interact with each other, greatly affecting the outcome. In this webinar, we’ll look at why early-stage PV and hybrid PV design is better understood as a search-space problem, and what can be missed when teams move too quickly from first assumptions into detailed design.

We examine how common project design workflows can narrow the range of options too early, and introduce a more exploratory approach: one that helps teams test more project directions, understand trade-offs sooner, and identify a stronger range before committing engineering effort to detailed design.

Dhruv Shah, Technical Sales Engineer at PVFARM, will walk us through what the PVFARM team learned while building RE PILOT, its new utility-scale solar design exploration platform. He’ll discuss how early assumptions around land, grid capacity, DC/AC ratio, ground coverage, pitch, equipment, cost, and storage can shape a project’s first layouts, and share example workflows around parcel value, cost zones, inverter loading, Pareto analysis, capacity breakpoints, and PV + BESS strategies to show how teams can find a stronger range before detailed engineering.

Webinar content
● Approaches to early-stage PV project design
● Example workflows and the questions they miss
● Finding the promising range before moving detailed engineering phase
● Q&A