EDF power solutions
How EDF power solutions Turned Their Solar Engineers Into Swiss Army Knives
CASE STUDY
EDF power solutions North America isn't your typical renewable energy company. Since 1987, they've been building clean energy infrastructure across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as a subsidiary of the French utility giant EDF Group. With 23 GW of developed projects, 7.8 GW gross of owned assets, and 16 GW under operations and maintenance contracts, they're a market-leading independent power producer that both develops projects for their own portfolio and builds for major customers like Amazon.
The Challenge
Even with sophisticated internal tools, EDF power solutions encountered challenges when projects demanded more flexibility than their automated systems could handle. Their homegrown software worked well for standard layouts but struggled with nuance and complexity that real-world solar projects often require. This forced the team into time-consuming manual workarounds that slowed down their development process and limited their ability to optimize designs.
"You can churn out a DXF that has full wiring, piles, everything in let's say an hour. Which is not really possible with anything else."
The Solution
PVFARM solved EDF power solutions’ flexibility problem by giving their solar engineers the tools to handle complex layouts without sacrificing speed or accuracy. What started as a replacement for manual workflows quickly evolved into something much more powerful—a platform that could handle the variable tracker configurations and complex layouts that their internal tools could not manage while adding new functionality like terrain analysis and rapid design iteration. The key was PVFARM's ability to produce realistic, buildable designs quickly while maintaining the engineering rigor that EDF power solutions’ projects demanded.
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Results
The impact went beyond just replacing a piece of software. PVFARM transformed how EDF power solutions' solar engineers work, turning them into what James calls "Swiss Army knives" who can handle civil, electrical, and systems engineering tasks without constantly pulling in specialists. This shift has practical implications: their the civil engineer no longer needs to focus on early-stage iterations that as the solar engineering team can is now handle equipped to manage these directly in PVFARM.
The business impact shows up in multiple ways. EDF power solutions can now respond to RFPs faster by generating their own preliminary designs instead of waiting four weeks for third- party engineering consultants. They're catching potential project issues earlier in the development process, avoiding investments in projects that might cost millions to fix later. On a recent project with challenging terrain and scattered oil wells, the team used PVFARM to run ten different layout scenarios, analyzing trade-offs between MV cable costs, grading expenses, and tracker types—work that helped position the project competitively.
Perhaps most importantly, PVFARM has enabled EDF power solutions to fit more realistic capacity and ground coverage ratios on their sites. By leveraging variable tracker lengths and ILR capabilities, they can be more accurate in their capacity estimates for complex sites, which translates directly to better project economics.
Final Thoughts
EDF power solutions' experience with PVFARM illustrates a key principle: the best tools don't just solve the problem you thought you had—they unlock capabilities you didn't know you needed. What began as a search for better layout flexibility evolved into a fundamental shift in how their engineering team operates, enabling faster decision-making, better cross-functional collaboration, and more accurate project economics.
The real measure of PVFARM's success isn't just in the time saved or the software licenses replaced. It's in the confidence that comes from having engineers who can quickly evaluate the fundamental metrics of any project without waiting for specialists or external consultants. In an industry where early-stage decisions can swing project economics by millions of dollars, that kind of agility isn't just nice to have; it's a competitive advantage.
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