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Utility-Scale Solar Projects aren’t forgiving—Every design decision gets multiplied across hundreds of thousands of components. | Eric Loos, PE, Director of Utility-Scale Engineering at Pure Power, shares how our in-house, multi-disciplinary team supports developers and EPCs of Utility-Scale projects. We deliver integrated electrical, structural, and owner’s engineering—including DC/MV optimization, grounding, arc flash, thermal studies, wire management, and PVsyst modeling.
Deep expertise alone doesn’t ensure project success. Eric highlights two common risks: misjudging the buildable area during early site planning and underestimating how critical the smallest design details become at scale.
That’s why Pure Power aligns early with experienced civil firms and stays tightly coordinated with developers, owners, and EPCs—ensuring that what gets designed can be built efficiently and correctly every time.
Transcription:
Hello my name is Eric Loos. I have been in the electrical engineering business for over 21 years now. With those 21 years 16 of them have been in the solar industry and the last 7 have been in the large-scale. Anything about let's say 100MW and higher. Pure power provides a multi-disciplined scope of service offering. First and foremost the electrical design. We provide detailed engineering for the solar system from the modules up to the substation, which is usually about 345kV. So we provide the DC design and optimization along with the medium voltage design. In addition to that we also provide the detailed studies that are required for a utility-scale system which would include things like which would include things like cable thermal grounding, arc flash. All that stuff is done in-house because we want to make sure that that's coordinated with our teams. In addition to that we provide structural engineering. So the foundations for your for your electrical systems, messenger system, cable wire management, all those type of things are done again in-house. And finally we provide owner’s engineering services that will provide detailed production modeling such as PVsyst. Like any discipline utility-scale offers their own unique challenges.
First and foremost one of the biggest challenges that I find to be most important is understanding the site design. So understanding the site features and developing that buildable area is crucial to creating a proper layout and providing an optimized electrical design and everything that comes along with that. Without that detailed design work and without that understanding projects can fail immediately. We address that by partnering with civil firms that have extensive solar experience and we bring them in as partners to ensure that our clients are successful. Another common challenge that we face is details. Design elements and construction elements on a utility-scale system will be repeated hundreds of thousands of times over. So the details truly matter. So we work very closely with our clients, the owners, the developers, and the construction team for that EPC that will build this to ensure their details are as accurate as they can be and expectations are met.
