The Cost Map: Visualizing Where Money Goes in Solar Layouts

The most expensive part of a solar project often isn’t where teams are looking — it’s between the handoffs. Each discipline makes sound decisions within its own scope, yet the combined outcome can be inefficient and costly.

This webinar introduces the concept of the Cost Map — a cross-disciplinary view that reveals how civil, electrical, and structural factors interact to drive project costs. Using PVFARM’s advanced modeling and automation, we’ll demonstrate how to visualize cost concentration across a site and understand how terrain, grading, pile engineering, and electrical collection influence total capital expenditure.

By combining geospatial data, cost intelligence, and layout modeling, we’ll explore how teams can identify the “black blocks” — areas of hidden inefficiency that no single discipline can detect alone. The goal: help developers, engineers, and EPCs see the full picture early and make design decisions together.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• Where project costs really accumulate: Learn how civil, electrical, and structural costs interact spatially — and why local design choices can ripple across the project budget.
  
  
• About cross-disciplinary cost trade-offs: Discover how PVFARM’s cost mapping capabilities reveal overlaps between grading, piles, and cabling that often go unnoticed in siloed workflows.
  
  
• To identify hidden inefficiencies between disciplines: See how collaborative layout modeling exposes the “black blocks” — the areas that become expensive when viewed through a combined engineering lens.
  
  
• How to leverage PVFARM to build smarter, together: Explore how shared data models and automated cost visualization tools enable teams to align early, reduce rework, and deliver more efficient, buildable solar projects.