From the magazine
Utility-scale solar projects are larger, interconnections are slower, and engineering decisions must anticipate regulations and supply chains years in advance. At the CT Solar Platform in Snyder, Texas – a 1.6 GW AC single-site development – the first phase, CT Solar One (110 MW AC), has been a testing ground for integrating civil design, BOS optimization and domestic content strategy. Levona Renewables led the development and engineering of the project and CEO Fernando Queiroz shares some key learnings.
At utility-scale sites like this one in Snyder, Texas, micro-terrain is more important than contour lines. The CT Solar Platform had long, gentle slopes that seemed easy for tracker installation. Once we started creating geotechnical and civil modeling, it became clear that the design would need to evolve for natural drainage swales, ground transitions and micro-basins.
The most important lesson was that trackers could not function as a drainage plan for the site. On small projects, engineers sometimes use tracker rows as hydrological boundaries: simple lines that show where rainwater flows and separate one watershed from another. This works on a small scale because the land is relatively uniform and requires minimal earth moving. On a large site, the leveling volumes required to level or reshape the site can reach hundreds of thousands of cubic meters. When earthworks become so large, the landform itself dominates water behavior, and tracker rows are no longer meaningful boundaries. The drainage system should be designed first and the tracker layout should be formed around it.
At CT Solar One, we started modeling how water would move through the site’s long corridors under different storms, using corridor-level statistical models – essentially a way to predict flood paths, erosion risks, and zones of high water flow over distances of hundreds of meters. The trackers were then aligned around defined drainage corridors. This reduced the need for excavation and filling; less soil needed to be excavated (“cut”) or placed (“filled”) to achieve stable slopes and prevent future erosion along access roads and range blocks.
Laying foundations
Large, single-location platforms amplify every assumption error. Stone refusal occurs, for example, when pile foundations cannot penetrate the ground due to a rock layer. On small sites this can be considered an isolated event. On a site the size of Snyder, pockets of refusal can suddenly appear within a few hundred yards. Denials should be treated statistically on a corridor scale, rather than row by row. Engineers model the probability of failure over long stretches of the site to plan foundation types, pile lengths and construction sequence.
The most effective technique was what we call inverse geotechnical modeling. Rather than designing foundations and responding to refusal during construction, we identified refusal-prone zones early, executed parallel structural alternatives, and redesigned blocks around these limitations. This allowed us to define mitigation measures in advance, such as shorter piles, micro-shifts in tracker corridors, limited pre-drilling or selective use of different pile types. The foundation design maintained structural reliability while protecting budget and schedule.
Logistics on location
On a site of 1.6 GW you not only design roads, but also the arteries of a multi-year construction ecosystem. The width, slope and alignment of roads influence the routing of power cables, drains, moorings and even the economic viability of certain tracker blocks.
We modeled the construction sequence at Snyder as rigorously as the civil plans. Access routes were optimized for the movement of steel bundles, inverters, medium voltage (MV) equipment and crane paths for handling large tracker components. When the construction process is designed early, the Balance of System (BOS) design becomes cheaper and implementation in the field becomes safer and faster.
BOS optimization
BOS optimization is traditionally seen as procurement-driven – seek the lowest cost per watt – but CT Solar One showed that the best BOS decisions come from engineering and procurement working as a single, integrated team.
For example, aligning DC supply routes with natural drainage corridors has reduced trenching – the amount of soil that must be excavated to open trenches for underground cables. By following the natural paths of the site rather than cutting across slopes, we were able to shorten these trenches and simplify post-construction restoration.
By using construction models to evaluate reel lengths, tensile stresses and connection points, we were able to eliminate unnecessary junction boxes and reduce the total number of cable lengths. These technology-based decisions improved commercial outcomes more than pure price negotiations.
The core lesson is that BOS optimization is not a purchasing exercise, but a design discipline dealing with geotechnical data, construction logistics and risk management. Engineering and purchasing cannot operate in silos if a project is to remain competitive.
Technical decisions
The Inflation Reduction Act introduced a series of incentives, domestic content rules, and bonus credits that influenced almost every technical decision. As a policy framework, it was expansive and transformative, encouraging American manufacturing while changing the way projects were designed, contracted, and optimized.
CT Solar One gave an example. Early in the purchase, imported equipment offered attractive prices. However, once we modeled the domestic content scenarios and their interaction with long-term financing, the technical path changed.
Ultimately, we opted for a fully domestic critical path supply chain involving four U.S. manufacturers: FTC Solar provided single-axis trackers with 100% of the metal components manufactured in Texas; WTEC provided MV and DC cabling manufactured in Florida, allowing U.S. origin certification; TMEIC supplied utility-scale inverters manufactured in Texas; and SEG Solar supplied high-efficiency PV modules manufactured in Texas.
This strategy influenced the project engineering; cable routing, MV equipment pads, crane logistics and even inverter pad grounding designs were customized to meet the dimensions, layout constraints and documentation packages of these components. It was a technical choice that supported suitability for domestic content while maintaining planning certainty and reducing supply chain risk. The lesson is that purchasing is no longer a tax conversation, but a technical conversation. Civil, electrical and structural teams must understand U.S. manufacturing routes because suitability for domestic content depends not only on where components are made, but also on how they are selected and installed. Knowing which materials qualify for bonus credits and how to handle them in the field determines foundation selection, wiring methods, purchasing sequence and even construction tolerances. Domestic content is not something that is verified at the end of a project; it must be developed from the beginning.
About the author
Fernando Queiroz is CEO and Executive Technical Director at Levona Renewables, where he leads the 1.6 GW CT Solar Platform in Snyder, Texas. He specializes in BOS optimization, tracker engineering and the integration of domestic content and IRA-driven requirements into large-scale solar design and previously developed the HURAC-640 single-axis tracker in Brazil.
