Unique Characteristics of Utility-Scale Solar Projects

The utility-scale solar industry continues to demonstrate remarkable momentum, with 9 GWdc of new capacity installed in Q1 2025 alone. While this represents a 7% decline from the previous year, the sector remains a cornerstone of the U.S. clean energy transition, with Wood Mackenzie projecting an additional 199 GWdc of utility-scale solar capacity to be added between 2025 and 2030. 

What sets utility-scale solar apart from residential and commercial installations goes beyond size alone. These massive projects – ranging from 5 megawatts to 500 megawatts or more – present unique design challenges and opportunities that require specialized knowledge and expertise. In the video below, HeatSpring instructor John Selby will highlight some of those unique characteristics.

If you’re ready to advance your career in solar design, enroll in the free “Utility-Scale Solar Design Overview” course which serves as the friendly front door to this specialized field, offering essential insights that will prepare you for more advanced training and opportunities in utility-scale PV design. 

Transcript below.

 In this lesson, I’m going to highlight some unique characteristics of utility-scale projects and show how each characteristic feeds into the next one. Our entry point into this chain, and probably the most obvious feature is that utility-scale projects are bigger. Instead of a few hundred kilowatts, or even a megawatt or 2 utility-scale projects can be 5, 10, 100, 500 megawatts.

Because the sites are so large, oftentimes we as designers have a lot more control over the site. We can choose how to group our modules into rows and where to put roads, unlike being at the mercy of a rooftop unit or a vent pipe on a rooftop. And this is a great thing, and it leads to way more standardization.

The largest utility-scale projects look like graph paper, each square being a unit of maybe 6 megawatts or more of solar modules connected to a transformer. You really have the opportunity to dial in the way that these are built on individual sites as well as across portfolios of similar projects.

Now, because you have more standardization upfront, there’s also more detail required. When you have 30 or 50 or 150 or more electricians working on a project simultaneously, everyone needs to know exactly how everything goes together, down to the exact number of wire clips that will be installed on each row to match up with procurement.

There’s just no way to bid or build a project efficiently at the upper end of the size range that we’re talking about without a very high level of detail. Even in the 1 to 5 megawatt range, it certainly benefits all the parties if the project owners, engineers, and contractors can all get on the same page while the design is on paper rather than waiting until it’s being installed.

At the bottom of the chain here is that all this extra detail can also mean that there’s a higher level of scrutiny for designs. Not only because these projects can run into the tens of millions of dollars, but because they’re complex electrical systems themselves, before we even get to our grid tie-in.

So there are additional layers of studies to demonstrate to the owners and financial backers that the system was properly designed that just aren’t present at the commercial size range, where site installers generally have a bit more latitude on installation details or are more subject to AHJ electrical inspectors.