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Your Solar Project, Powered by Air

Optimize Project Design and Return to Profitability

By Bart Oegema, Director of Product Management

Layout optimization is a key driver in project economics. Increasing capacity and improving yield are two primary economic levers, yet standard tracker products confine capacity and yield, and ultimately limit profitability.

Why? Motors and their related equipment, including gearboxes, local controllers, self-powered row modules, and batteries are expensive. Standard trackers limit your minimum repeating block to 80 modules because partial trackers are cost-prohibitive. These large repeating blocks create unnecessary limitations on project design and leave large swaths of land underutilized or unused.

The Sunfolding T29 eliminates these constraints by eliminating motor-based equipment and replacing it with the AirDrive, an air-based actuato r made in the USA.

Framed by the irregular edges of a forest, the project above would create suboptimal project economics if standard trackers – with motors and all of their necessary equipment – were installed, undercutting profitability by underutilizing the land.

The Sunfolding T29 allows you to reclaim and maximize unused land. Now your project’s repeating blocks can be set to any parameter, even as small as a single string length. Eighteen modules, twenty-nine modules, a thousand modules; it is all the same to us. A new era of layout flexibility (and project economics) emerges.

As a bonus, the AirDrive doesn’t require module spaces around motors, gearboxes, bearings, and local controllers, further improving project density with gap-free rows.

The Sunfolding T29's power-dense form and layout flexibility reclaims wasted space, typically increasing project capacity by 20% or more, by maximizing N-S land usage and through additional, shorter rows that fill the east and west sides. This particular project layout can then follow the forest line to take full economic advantage of every ounce of land.

For capacity limited projects, designers can utilize the Sunfolding T29 to generate the most kWh from a fixed MW capacity. The Sunfolding T29’s flexibility allows N-S row lengths to be maximized, eliminating the need for additional rows. Row spacing can then be increased, yielding up to 4% additional kWh for the project.

The Sunfolding T29 helps project developers maximize project capacity and energy production, allowing our customers to squeeze the most out of every project and deliver the lowest LCOE.