Unlocking 5% More Energy: Terrasmart's New Software

Five percent sounds modest until you do the math on a 50 MW project.

At current capacity factors, a 5% improvement in energy yield on a utility-scale solar installation can translate to millions in additional revenue over a project's lifetime — without adding a single panel, inverter, or acre of land. That's the promise behind Terrasmart's newly launched Peak Production Package, an expansion of its PeakYield software platform that uses terrain-aware algorithms and irradiance optimization to squeeze more out of every tracker row.

It's a signal that the next competitive frontier in solar isn't just hardware — it's the intelligence layer sitting on top of it.

Why Tracker Optimization Actually Matters

Single-axis trackers have become the default for utility-scale solar in North America for good reason. By following the sun throughout the day, trackers typically add 15–25% more energy yield compared to fixed-tilt systems. Most developers already know this. What's less appreciated is how much performance gets left on the table once those trackers are deployed on real-world terrain — terrain that is rarely flat, rarely uniform, and rarely behaves the way energy models assume it will.

The gap between what a project models and what it actually produces is often where developer margins go to die.

Standard tracker control algorithms are designed for idealized conditions. They rotate every row in sync, following a single astronomical tracking angle calculated from GPS coordinates and time of day. On a perfectly flat site with no shading complications, that works fine. But most projects aren't flat, and diffuse irradiance conditions — overcast skies, high-albedo ground cover, partial cloud cover — create scenarios where the "optimal" angle for one row isn't optimal for its neighbor. The result is clipping losses, inter-row shading, and underperformance that only becomes visible after commissioning, when it's expensive to fix.

This is the problem Terrasmart is building software to solve.

What the Peak Production Package Actually Does

Terrasmart's Peak Production Package is built on two core algorithmic capabilities, both of which have now been validated by DNV — a detail that matters more than it might initially appear.

The first is topography-informed backtracking. Standard backtracking is a well-established technique that rotates tracker rows away from their optimal sun-tracking angle in the morning and evening to prevent one row from casting a shadow on the row behind it. It works, but it applies the same correction uniformly across an entire site. On uneven ground, that uniform correction is wrong. Rows on a south-facing slope have different shading geometry than rows on a north-facing slope or a cross-slope. Terrasmart's topography-informed version allows individual rows to be positioned at different angles, customized to their actual position in the landscape. Each row becomes its own optimization problem.

The second capability is irradiance-optimized tracking, which addresses what happens when direct normal irradiance gives way to diffuse light — the kind of lighting you get under cloud cover or high aerosol conditions. Under diffuse conditions, the sky becomes a hemisphere of light rather than a point source, and the optimal panel angle changes accordingly. The algorithm adjusts tracker angles in real time to maximize energy capture during these conditions, rather than continuing to chase a sun position that's effectively irrelevant when the sky is overcast.

Together, these two features are what Terrasmart claims can deliver up to 5% in performance improvement. The base PeakYield package — standard weather stows, remote site access — remains available, but the row-to-row optimization capability lives in this new premium tier.

The Financing Angle Nobody's Talking About

Here's the non-obvious part of this announcement: the DNV validation isn't just a marketing credential. It's a financing tool.

When DNV validates the energy yield assumptions baked into a software package, lenders and tax equity investors can model those gains with more confidence — and that changes the capital stack.

Terrasmart's VP of Software Solutions, Ashton Vandemark, acknowledged this directly, noting that the topography-informed backtracking improvements are "already being leveraged when modeling energy production during the financing stage." That's a subtle but important statement. It means developers aren't waiting until a project is operational to capture the value of these optimizations — they're using the validated performance data to underwrite better financial models, potentially unlocking more favorable debt terms or higher valuations at sale.

For projects under 20 MW — the distributed generation space where Terrasmart is specifically targeting this package — this matters even more. Smaller projects have less margin for error. A 5% yield improvement on a 5 MW community solar project is the difference between a deal that pencils and one that doesn't.

Terrain Is the Underestimated Variable

Most solar project development conversations focus on interconnection, permitting, land cost, and module pricing. Terrain is often treated as a fixed constraint — you grade what you can afford to grade, and you model the rest as a minor performance penalty.

That assumption is increasingly costly. As land costs rise and developers push into more complex topographies — hillsides, former mining sites, agricultural land with significant grade changes — the performance delta between a terrain-aware control system and a one-size-fits-all approach grows wider.

Flat land near good transmission is already picked over. The sites coming to market now have contours.

Terrasmart has deployed more than 25 GW of solar across roughly 6,000 systems in North America, which gives the company a dataset few competitors can match. That installation base informs how these algorithms get trained and validated. When DNV stress-tests the energy yield claims, they're doing it against real-world deployment data, not just simulation.

The topography-informed backtracking approach also reduces the need for aggressive site grading, which carries its own cost and environmental implications. Less cut-and-fill means lower civil costs, faster permitting in sensitive areas, and reduced erosion risk. Software that lets you build on a hillside without terraforming it first is worth something beyond the energy yield numbers.

Where This Fits in the Broader Market

Terrasmart isn't the only company working on intelligent tracker control — Array Technologies, Nextracker, and others have their own optimization layers. But the market is large enough, and the performance differentiation real enough, that this isn't a winner-take-all competition. Developers will increasingly evaluate tracker suppliers not just on hardware specs and cost-per-watt, but on the quality of the software stack that controls them.

The validation from DNV is Terrasmart's way of entering that conversation with credibility. Third-party performance validation from a respected engineering firm changes the sales dynamic — it gives procurement teams and lenders something to point to beyond a vendor's own claims.

For utility-scale solar developers modeling their next project, the question worth asking is whether the yield assumptions in your energy model reflect what your control software can actually deliver on imperfect terrain, in real weather conditions. If the answer is "we used standard backtracking assumptions," there may be performance sitting uncaptured — and depending on your project economics, it might be worth finding out exactly how much.

Explore how Terrasmart's innovations can enhance your solar projects today at InfraSale Marketplace.

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[INTERNAL LINK: energy yield]

[INTERNAL LINK: solar project financing]