Terabase Energy is focused on developing digital tools for larger solar power plants. At SPI 2019, they introduced a new tool that helps developers design and optimizer out solar power plants.

It’s a familiar map interface, like Google Earth, allowing you to scan an area, and identify a spot that would be suitable for solar energy development.

The tool itself has a lot of rich GIS information. For example, if you want to see how ‘hilly’ the area is, you can visualize the degree to which there are steep slopes, that you wouldn’t install a solar-powered system on. The tool will then show you ‘orange’ areas that will be too steep to build solar panel installations on.

You can also visualize how much sunshine a place will get. You can do this by putting a layer that shows the amount of sunshine in a region. This is helpful because most solar power plant developers are going to look for the sunny spots.

Once someone has identified where they want to build a solar energy project, the can drill into more detail. They can drill into their spot on the earth. At that point, they would be interested in looking at things like where are the electrical transmission lines that they’d be able to tap into. The digital tool would have a map showing, where the transmission lines are and you can click on them to get before information about who owns the line and how much capacity is available.

After identifying the spot, you can then see what the weather looks like, how much sunshine at that location, and then you can design the solar power plant.

Demonstrated in the video above, a simple square is done. He’s going to build a plant next to the transmission line. His electrical substation is going to be next to the big transmission line. He then selects the technology. You will have the option to choose from mono facial solar panels, bifacial solar panels, a fixed-tilt system, and a tracking system.

After making the technology selections, then he does a ‘sensitivity’ study. Because there are a million ways that you can configure a solar energy project, this new technology lets you look at different ways of configuring it to see which way will be the most profitable for the developers.

After selecting your options you will then hit submit. The project will then go to the rather large data processing engine. The engine will engineer the design of the power plant, estimate the cost of solar panel installations, look at how much solar energy it will produce, and then run an IRR analysis. Using this information the developer can identify, ‘is this a good site?’ ‘if it is a good site, what is the best way to configure the solar-powered system?’.

Once you get the deigns back, the technology will then crunch the numbers on how much energy the solar power plant will produce. Once this information is available, you can get a detailed report, and from there you can do business decisions.

Get creative and design your own rooftop solar system by going to HaHaSmart and using the design DIY tool and see how much the system will cost using the price checker tool.