Watch a demoA buyer’s guide for utility-scale teams
How to choose utility-scale solar and storage software
Start with the segment you build in
Residential
<10kW per rooftop
Residential software is built around the sale as much as the design: roof layout, shading, a production estimate, a proposal a homeowner signs. If that's your work, this guide isn't for you, and the tools that serve it are a different set from the ones below.
Commercial & Industrial
<1MW per site
Commercial & Industrial (C&I) sits between the two. Rooftop and small ground arrays, permit-ready drawings, string and inverter configuration. Several tools built for this segment publish a hard design cap, the lowest at 1.25 MW DC, which marks where it ends more plainly than any argument could.
Utility-Scale
>1MW per plant
Above a megawatt the job changes shape. You're screening land you don't own yet, laying out power stations, roads and battery containers, sizing medium-voltage cable, moving earth, and building a cost model a financier will read. That's what the rest of this guide covers, for PV, for standalone storage, and for hybrid plants.
Four ways utility-scale teams get this done
General-purpose tools you already own
CAD with solar plugins
Specialised PV platforms
Software you build yourself
Which tool covers which stage
Group 1: Utility-scale design platforms
These turn a site into a buildable design. If you are above 1 MW and the layout, the electrical and the cost model all have to come out of one run, this is the table to read.
Group 2. Prospecting and site data
Everything before the design. These find the land, test whether it is buildable and tell you what the grid will accept, then hand off. None of them produces a plant design.
Group 3. Energy yield and economics
Where the production number comes from, and what it is worth. Four of these five do nothing else, which is the point of the group.
Group 4. Rooftop and C&I
Built for buildings, not fields. Most publish a hard design cap, which makes this the clearest boundary in the category. If your projects cross those numbers, you have outgrown this table.
Group 5. General-purpose tooling
No table, because the answer is short. Spreadsheets, AutoCAD, Google Earth and QGIS cover manual layout editing and manual documentation, and nothing else on these rows. Autodesk Civil 3D adds grading, terrain and cut-and-fill, which it does better than anything here, and Autodesk publishes no PV layout capability in it.
The tools you'll hear named
One entry each, from published material. Each links to a fuller comparison.
PVsyst
The yield standard, and not a layout tool. It imports a 3D scene rather than drawing a plant, and it's what you run for the bankable P50, P90 and P99 a lender expects. No site screening, no MV cabling, no civil works, and no native .dwg import.
PVcase
Four products, not one. Ground Mount and Roof Mount automate layout inside AutoCAD and need a live licence. Prospect covers land and grid, and Yield is a cloud energy model with ray tracing. Deep CAD control, with the CAD dependency that comes with it.
Helioscope
Rooftop and C&I, with the boundary published rather than argued: design caps of 1.25, 5 and 30 MW DC by tier, and ten projects per licence each month. Shading is module-level and hourly, and NREL validated the shade reports independently.
Glint
Built for the front of the funnel. Land, roads, exclusions and grid connections on a map, pre-permit layouts, and fifteen years of half-hourly yield across PV, storage and hybrid in eighteen markets, exporting straight into PVsyst for the bankable run.
Terabase
The widest published span here, and it reaches past us in both directions. Yield modelling on projects over 1 GW with full ray tracing at one end, construction management and field robotics at the other.
Eight questions to ask every PV, BESS or renewable software vendor
Take the checklist into your next vendor call
The eight questions above, plus the full feature comparison, in a PDF you can bring to a meeting.
Where RatedPower fits
Every guide published by a vendor owes its reader one plain statement of where that vendor sits. Ours is this: we fit utility-scale teams doing prospection, feasibility and pre-construction design at volume. If your work is commercial, industrial or residential rooftop, other tools on this page serve you better. Here it is in three parts.
The span we cover
Feasibility through pre-construction detailed layout, for PV, standalone storage and hybrids. A real site in; a layout, an electrical design, a 3D ray-traced yield, a CAPEX model and 400-plus editable documents out, in one pass.
What one run produces
One run returns the layout placed against your terrain and exclusions, the electrical design sized to your standard, and the techno-economics built from that same design. Change one parameter and all three move together.
Where we stop
The energy yield reconciles with PVsyst. The deepest manual civil and cabling work belongs to CAD tools, and our answer is a .dwg round-trip. Construction is outside our span entirely.
AI Power Analyst runs the iterations for you
What teams report after they switch to Enverus
Aukera Energy: Modelling BESS dispatch with confidence across hybrid PV projects
«One of the key features we're using is the software's capacity to simulate dispatching in a hybrid project with PV and BESS: you can upload your own electricity prices and simulate with your own data, which helps a lot to validate and optimise our base designs.»
Elsewedy Electric: from weeks of engineering work to smarter designs in hours
«The 3D Energy tool is really useful when you're dealing with tough terrains — it shows you exactly which modules are most affected by shading, and gives you the freedom to explore different installation approaches to mitigate it.»
SolarFarm Feasibility: Building a feasibility business on rapid design iteration with RatedPower
«Using traditional methods, I often found that it would take a lot of time, and a simple change could ripple and really take time and resources away. I built my business on the ability to give people the chance to look at a lot of different versions very quickly and really find the best solution for that site.»
Mulilo: Slashing layout generation time while strengthening stakeholder alignment
«Our turnarounds are a lot quicker now. The turnaround time on everything is maybe 10% of what it was before. Layouts that used to take a couple of hours can now be done in just a few minutes with our templates.»
Res Group: Enhancing project delivery by connecting RatedPower with AutoCAD and PVsyst©
«When manually doing a preliminary site layout in AutoCAD, it can take considerable time and resources. Depending on the size of the site, it can easily take one or two days just for one single scenario. RatedPower’s ability to export layouts as DWG files ensures smooth integration into AutoCAD, helping reduce this workload and speed up design iterations.»
Recurrent Energy: Turning multi-tool workflows into a unified PV+BESS platform
«We have reduced our overall engineering workflow by about 50%, thanks to the platform combining CAPEX estimation, AutoCAD designs, and battery storage simulations. We’ve been able to design several megawatts of storage and it has helped us improve our grid connection applications for stationary BESS projects throughout Europe.»
Akuo Energy: Making smarter use of land with Layout Editor
«The new Layout Editor gives us more flexibility to optimize land use, with the option to remove or add structures and align them with parcel borders. It helps us make better use of the total available area of our plant.»
Alten: civil design, BESS & Layout Editor flexibility
«Being able to move trackers and adjust them to fencing or restricted areas directly within the Layout Editor gives us much greater agility when creating designs, because we don’t need to export them to other tools to keep working.»
Photon: Bringing solar design in-house
«RatedPower is truly a value creator. It allows us to develop projects more efficiently while adding significant value to each opportunity. In Japan, tools like this are still not widely adopted, and much of the solar project development process remains manual.»
Ekhi: From feasibility checks to confident designs in record time
«One of the most common challenges we face is space constraints. We need to play around with different tilts and pitch, and this used to be quite a long process with several tools. The great thing about RatedPower is that we can simulate many scenarios, varying all these parameters, and have it done in no time. With the Layout Editor, we now see a huge improvement when fine-tuning our plant layouts.»
Optimizing PV projects and overcoming the limitations of legacy software
«We have received a highly professional response when we needed support or training from the team. RatedPower helps us optimize our projects and provides us with a significant advantage over our competitors.»
Hidrosolar: Unlocking 30% more efficiency in solar design with RatedPower
«We were able to be up to 30% more efficient when making estimates for new projects by having a clearer idea for future developments. So, in terms of time, we could save around 20% to 30%»
Enhancing Hodson Energy’s streamlined project qualification and PV design
«With Enverus PRISM, we quickly filter opportunities and gain a holistic view of viable projects. Enverus RatedPower automates our design process, turning weeks into minutes»
Kickstarting efficient project pipelines
«Although every single engineering aspect and decision is reassessed upon further stages of development, having a pre-made set of rules and standards to start from really helps simplify the development process.»
RatedPower's speed helps us boost our competitive advantage
«Now we can turn around design documents within hours and minutes to stakeholders, landowners, partners or engineers, to get through our regulatory process. This has allowed us to move projects forward faster.»
Accelerating solar design from 5GW to 30GW per year
«Before RatedPower, there was a high level of variability, simple land layout to more irregular layouts. Now, we can quickly filter down sites from what is possible to what is realistic.»
Empowering Recurrent Energy from PV design to financial feasibility
«Of all the solutions we evaluated, RatedPower proved to be the most comprehensive, allowing us to generate layouts, one-line diagrams, reports, energy yield forecasts, and CAPEX & LCOE estimates—all in one platform.»
Empowering solar PV design customization through faster iterations
«In one or two weeks, I became very familiar with the software. I was able to do more iterations on our solar layouts, and we could fill the interconnection requests in no time.»
Enhancing land assessment efficiency for PV developers
«RatedPower produces a set of documentation to deal with most of the environmental agencies' requirements and for application of grid connection authorization processes.»
Competitive positioning in large-scale overseas PV plant bidding
«RatedPower has a solid customer base and good reputation abroad. It delivers required documents in multiple languages for our global bids while adopting international design standards»
Doubling PV project development bandwidth with RatedPower
«Thanks to the new developments created by RatedPower that adapt to our needs, we could double our capacity. The time we used to spend on designing and reviewing designs is now focused on doing more projects.»
Centralizing solar development in one app
«We used to use a mix of tools like AutoCAD, spreadsheets and PVsyst. Now with RatedPower, our team can be innovative and explore more possibilities without wasting time, as each design only takes minutes to run.»
Driving efficiency and optimizing resources for more than 50 projects
«RatedPower offers highly personalized customer support. The team has been efficient in solving our doubts and helping us learn how to make the most out of the tool based on our unique needs.»
Harnessing RatedPower to carry out invaluable PV equipment analysis
«RatedPower provides us with simplicity and flexibility in our solar projects while requiring fewer resources. Other software options typically demand more resources on our end to complete these calculations.»
A three-in-one software that saves PNE time and resources
«It's easy to use, even for non-technical users. Now, anyone in our offices can efficiently create their own designs, and our German engineers can manipulate anything in our projects remotely since RatedPower's platform is cloud-based.»
Get real-life inspiration from energy professionals like you
Check how other development and engineering teams are leveraging software to increase ROI and mitigate risks of their utility-scale solar assets.
Questions buyers ask
What solar software covers, and why LCOE moves
Ready to see what one pass looks like on your site?
Walk through the platform at your own pace, or book a session where we build one of your real sites live.