New solar tracking tech promises to cut costs – and ease the land wars

California-based Nextracker has launched a new take on its industry leading sun tracking technology that promises to open up Australia’s large-scale solar market to sloped, uneven, and challenging sites – and to do so without driving up development costs or further alienating farmers.

Nextracker, which set up an office in Australia in 2016, specalises in technology that optimises the performance of large-scale solar projects by enabling their panels to follow the sun’s movement across the sky.

These days, solar tracking technology is standard for the vast majority of solar farms as an essential addition to boost the levelled cost of energy, or LCOE – with the exception of around 10 per cent of projects that need to be fixed, due to weather conditions or other mitigating factors. In Australia, Nextracker is the biggest player.

But as solar farms have become bigger, smarter and panels more efficient at converting sunlight into energy, the job of finding suitable land on which to build solar farms has become increasingly difficult, which is adding costs and planning and permitting headaches during the earlier stages of development.

Nextracker hopes to address this problem with its new terrain following solution, called NX Horizon-XTR, which both optimises the performance of solar panels while also adapting to the existing contours of a site.

By doing this, Nextracker hopes to remove the added risk and costs to projects proposed for “challenging” sites that would usually require significant earthwork or longer foundation pile lengths to accommodate.

And the cost reductions could be considerable, according to the company, with “savings in the millions” from reduced grading and shorter piles said to have been validated using the technology on select utility scale projects.

An XTR data sheet says that depending on site conditions and customer preference, reductions in the amount of grading cut-and-fill or in foundation pier lengths – or a combination of both – could save developers up to 90% in grading costs and lower steel costs.

But it’s not just about cost. The new technology comes at a time when Australia’s agriculture industry is getting increasingly cagey about the amount of “prime” farm land being dedicated to cultivating electrons, instead of food or other more traditional crops.

Just last week a new group dedicated to the opposition of solar farms on agricultural land was launched in the Riverina region of New South Wales, with the backing of the local state MP.

Among other concerns, the Riverina Sustainable Food Alliance (RSFA) lists one of its key objections to solar developments on agricultural land as the long-term impact of “substantial earthworks” to flatten parts of the undulating land.

“This will have a detrimental impact on the water table and likely increase the threat of dryland salinity, an issue we have worked so hard to address,” one member and local landowner said.

And this concern is not lost on solar developers.

“There are some things you cannot out-engineer, and in my experience well-established topsoil is one of them,” said Nick de Vries, senior vice president of technology and asset management at US solar developer, Silicon Ranch, one of the companies to have successfully trialed Nextracker’s Horizon-XTR at scale.

“Deploying traditional trackers on sites with varied terrain has required extra earthwork and longer foundation piles, which increases project costs and adds risk,” he said.

“Earthwork is especially painful as it affects a solar project three times: first performing grading, next reseeding the exposed dirt, and later fixing the inevitable erosion and hydrology issues that come from the lack of well-vegetated topsoil.”

Nextracker’s director of sales in Australia, Andrew Chino, said that the feedback from developers locally has likewise been that its appeal extends beyond the economics of building solar on difficult land to encompass genuine concerns around land disturbance and dual use of land.

“We are a green industry working towards a renewable future. Any unnecessary destruction of the land to get sites built is counterintuitive,” Chino told RenewEconomy in an interview.

“[Environmental stewardship of a solar farm site] has been a [development] requirement, but if we can mitigate environmental issues before we build, it’s a win for everyone involved.

“And now, when we’re talking about gigawatt-scale projects … ease of installation and earthworks, or minimising earthworks, is going to be critical to get those projects built.

“Renewable energy shouldn’t come at the cost of our environment or be prohibited by cost,” Chino said. “NX Horizon-XTR opens a new frontier for solar developers to affordably build on sites that were previously too expensive, while respecting the historical and environmental aspects of the land.”