The solar industry has historically thrived on nice, flat parcels of land for project development.
Viewed through a product development lens, the early “customer use case” — flat sites — shaped the product requirements for tracking technologies (favoring long, continuous torque tube designs for optimal economics) and the project design tools that supported them.
But now, the customer use case is changing — and fast.
During a recent webinar hosted by pv magazine, attendees were asked about terrain in their project pipelines. Of nearly 300 participants, a staggering 97% reported that at least a quarter of their pipeline involved challenging terrain.
It’s worth noting that this is after “challenging terrain” was defined as featuring one or both of steep slopes and undulating land, not just the gently sloping hills that the industry has become accustomed to.
With solar demand growing, the availability of flatland will only increase the percentage of terrain-challenged projects.
As Nevados turns 10 years old, we reflect and share some of the learnings from deploying solar trackers on challenging terrain; that innovation had to happen not only on the product side — with our articulating tracking systems capable of handling up to 37% slopes — but also in the tools and processes used to design solar projects on real-world terrain.
Early on, as our product design matured, it became clear that off-the-shelf project design software simply wasn’t built for the complexity of uneven sites.
Energy optimization
For legacy flat-site trackers, rotation schedules are straightforward — just point the tracker perpendicular to the sun throughout the day.
But when building on undulating terrain without grading, elevation differences create shading risks between adjacent rows. Firstly, you need a tracker that allows for each row to maintain independent control. The next challenge is to create a tracker rotation schedule that accounts for terrain and adjusts accordingly.
Since no existing software could model this behavior, the Nevados team developed a proprietary algorithm that creates a digital terrain model and iterates until the software achieves optimal schedules — free of self-shading. This method can eliminate up to 50% of terrain-related energy losses.
Layout design
Legacy tracker systems, designed around long, continuous torque tubes, depend heavily on grading to force-fit the land to the tracker. Again, this design informed the requirements for layout software.
Our TRACE All Terrain Tracker uses a modular “bay design” architecture that uses a segmented torque tube design and articulating couplers at each pile. Each pile and coupler is matched precisely to the site’s topography. This was a shift in solar tracker layout design – getting down to the pile level rather than bigger tracker blocks or rows.
Once again, no existing software could handle this level of granularity.
So we built our own bespoke layout slope analysis software — allowing precise, terrain-conforming tracker layouts that specify the level of articulation needed at every pile.
Figure 3 Example of Nevados TRACE Tracker with a 6-8 module “bay design” deployed on challenging terrain
Most of our projects involve complex, real-world terrain. When a project hits our desk, our mission is clear: respect the land, don’t reshape it. The lessons we’ve learned through this experience have been baked into our design tools.
Through sophisticated tracker technology and the custom software we’ve developed, we give every site the extra care, attention, and precision it deserves — designing projects that work with the land’s natural form, not against it.
As the market shifts even more towards building on challenging terrain without grading, innovation in project design tools will inevitably follow.
Rahul Chandra is the head of product marketing at Nevados. The company’s solar tracking solution helps developers, EPCs, and asset owners maximize solar production and eliminate grading on any natural terrain — flat, sloped, or rolling.
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