Solar design software for ground-mount
plants in the Philippines

Flat land near a substation is rare. Philippine ground-mount sites tend to sit on rolling and sloped ground, on volcanic soils, on old ash and tuff deposits, on weathered rock that changes hardness inside a single row. Two rows of piles on the same block can need two different pile lengths. The site that looked buildable on a satellite image becomes an earthwork question the moment somebody puts a real surface under it.

Then there is water. Monsoon rain and typhoon season turn drainage and erosion into design inputs, not site problems to be handled later. Where you cut, where you fill, where the roads run and how the graded surface sheds water decide whether the plant survives its first wet season without scour under the racks and washed-out access. Those are decisions made on the drawing, months before mobilisation.

A layout-first workflow hides all of it. The panels go on a flat idealised surface, the layout is approved, and only then does the terrain get attached: civil reviews the design, finds the slopes, and sends back a grading requirement that the layout cannot absorb. The earthwork volume, the pile lengths and the cable runs are all discovered after the geometry is frozen. That is the point where change orders start, and it is late.

PVsyst is the yield tool your team already runs, and PVX.Cad does not replace it. Modules import from PAN files, inverters from OND files, and string sizing is validated against PVsyst rules inside AutoCAD. The simulation stays where it belongs.

What changes is the scene PVsyst receives. PVX.Cad exports a terrain-corrected PVCollada 2.0 file carrying the graded terrain mesh, the full electrical hierarchy, placed 3D device bodies and shading objects, so the yield model matches the surface that will actually be built rather than a flat approximation of it. Row-to-row shading on a sloped Philippine site is a function of the graded ground, and now the simulation sees that ground.

The workflow is the same for large-scale solar in Malaysia. Teams bidding through the LSS programme work to bid deadlines and awarded tariffs, which means the earthwork volume, the pile schedule and the cable run length are commercial numbers, not detail-design numbers. Getting them from the terrain during bid preparation, instead of after award, is what protects the margin.

EPCC contractors use PVX.Cad the way their civil and electrical teams already work: one DWG, terrain in, grading compared, layout placed, piles scheduled, cabling routed, PVsyst scene exported. Ground-mount only. PVX.Cad does not design floating plants.