Built for utility-scale solar

From a site boundary to a buildable, costed layout — in minutes.

SolarCAD places every table or tracker inside your boundary, groups them into ITS stations, positions the string combiner boxes, routes the cabling along roads and trenches, pools the substations, and hands you a DXF drawing set and a bill of quantities. The kind of work that takes a design engineer days.

A utility-scale solar plant laid out in SolarCAD: tables grouped into colour-coded ITS zones, internal roads, string combiner boxes and routed cabling.

Everything a layout needs, in one pass

Not a rooftop tool. SolarCAD is built for ground-mount plants where the hard part is not drawing panels — it is the grouping, the cabling and the quantities.

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Placement that respects the site

Fixed tilt or trackers, full and half tables, road grids, periphery ring road, setbacks and no-table zones. Rows are held strictly inside the boundary, including concave corners.

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Electrical design, not just geometry

ITS grouping to your AC capacity, SCB placement packed to your strings-per-box limit, and cabling routed along roads and trenches — never across a table.

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Quantities you can price

An Excel workbook down to per-ITS, per-SCB and per-table detail, with cable lengths taken from the routes actually drawn, not estimated.

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Real terrain

Import a DEM, georeferenced against your KML site. Slope banding shows what is buildable; drop everything above a threshold and see the capacity cost immediately.

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Shadow analysis

The 21 December, 9am–3pm criterion: the window your row pitch actually achieves, the pitch it needs, and which rows your ITS stations and substations shade.

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MV to the substation

Three-phase sizing at 11, 22 or 33 kV, with feeders looped station to station (RMU) or run direct (ICOG). Sections step up along a feeder, and parallel circuits appear when one cable cannot carry the load.

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Setting-out, not just quantities

Every pile with its latitude and longitude, ground level, top level and length — reveals vary along a table because the table is rigid and the ground is not.

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Several parcels, one plant

Import multiple boundaries and lay each out independently, with substations pooling across parcels and cabling routed between them.

How it works

Four steps. The whole loop is fast enough to try three layouts before lunch.

Bring in the siteImport a DXF (with your layer names) or a KML/KMZ, or draw the boundary. Exclusion zones and survey geometry come with it.
Set the system and fillModule, orientation, strings, tilt, row pitch, road grid. Press Fill and the plant appears with its capacity.
Add the electrical designITS stations, SCBs, cabling and substations. Drag a station and everything downstream re-routes and re-costs.
ExportA layered DXF for the drawing set and an Excel BOQ for the estimator.

What you hand over

Output your drawing office and your estimator can use directly.

DXF drawing

Boundary, exclusion zones, setback, roads, every table on its own ITS and SCB layer with its field tag, ITS stations, substations, MV feeders labelled with their cross-section, trenches, foundation piles and slope bands — each on a named layer, with the dense ones switched off so the sheet opens clean.

Excel bill of quantities

Plant summary, per-ITS capacity, per-SCB detail, a hierarchical ITS → SCB → table sheet, a DC cable schedule with drop and losses, an MV feeder schedule, trench quantities by cable type, and a pile setting-out sheet with coordinates and levels.

The exported DXF drawing open in CAD, with each ITS zone on its own layer.

Built for the plants that are hard to lay out

Mounting	Fixed tilt (2P, 4P and other orientations, half tables) and single-axis trackers (1S/2S/3S/4S, mixed on one site)
Site input	DXF with layer mapping · KML / KMZ with true coordinates · drawn by hand · several parcels in one plant
Terrain	GeoTIFF DEM, georeferenced to the site · slope banding and exclusion · shadow criterion and equipment shadows
Electrical	ITS grouping by AC capacity · SCB packing by strings per box · trench and road cable routing with capacity limits · string home-runs · substation pooling · DC and MV cable sizing · looped or direct MV feeders
Output	Layered DXF (R12) · Excel BOQ workbook · cloud projects you can reopen and re-run

What Pro includes

The full feature set, exactly as it appears inside the app.

Layout engine — fixed tilt and trackers
ITS grouping and SCB placement
DXF import with layer mapping
DXF export — boundary, roads, tables, SCBs
Cable routing in the DXF, with cable quantities
DC cable sizing — cross-section, voltage drop and losses
MV cable to the substation — looped (RMU) or direct (ICOG)
Trench network, split by cable type
Full BOQ workbook — per ITS, per SCB, per table
BOQ summary sheet

Several parcels in one plant
Substations and ITS→substation cabling
String (home-run) cables
Layout phase optimiser
Terrain import — DEM, georeferenced
Slope analysis, and dropping steep tables
Shadow analysis — row pitch and equipment shadows
Pile setting-out schedule with latitude and longitude
OpenStreetMap check on a KML or georeferenced DXF

A Basic plan is available for smaller plants, with limits on plant size and saved projects. Ask us which fits your work.