SolarLayout & BESS Desktop

Utility-scale solar layout and battery storage, on Windows

4 followers

Utility-scale solar layout and battery storage, on Windows

4 followers

Two Windows apps for utility-scale renewables. SolarLayout Desktop turns a site boundary into a full PV plant design - tables, inverters, cables, yield, CAD and PDF. BESS Desktop runs a year of battery dispatch and builds the financial model.

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Launch tags:Design Tools•Batteries•Climate Tech

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Maker

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Hi Product Hunt, We build engineering software for the people who put utility-scale renewable plants on the ground. Today we're launching two Windows apps. SolarLayout Desktop. Designing a solar plant starts with the boundary of a piece of land. Everything after — where the module tables go, how many fit, where inverters and control rooms sit, how cables run, how much energy it makes in year 25 — is downstream of that shape. In most EPC teams that pass is done by hand in CAD and takes days; change the module or the row spacing and you redo much of it. This does it in minutes from a KMZ: it fills the usable ground with tables while keeping water bodies, roads, transmission corridors, steep terrain and obstructions clear, places inverters and control rooms, routes DC/AC/MV cables with lengths, sets lightning arresters on a coverage grid, and estimates yield at P50/P75/P90. Then it exports what a team actually builds from — A3 PDF report, single-line diagram, bill of materials, KMZ, layered DXF. BESS Desktop. For battery storage the first question isn't layout, it's size. You tell it what the plant generates and what it's contracted to deliver; it runs a dispatch simulation at 15-minute intervals across a full year, then builds the year-by-year financial model — IRR, NPV, full cash flow — and exports a report you can hand a lender. It will also search for the solar/wind/battery mix itself instead of you guessing at it. Both run entirely on your own machine. SolarLayout's only network calls are optional weather and elevation lookups. That was deliberate. A lot of our users work from sites with unreliable connectivity. Two honest limits. SolarLayout is not a shading simulator — row-to-row and building shadows yes, terrain and horizon no. And the single-line diagrams are drawings you edit, not validated electrical models. Every screen in both apps opens without signing up, so you can look at all of it first. Generating a layout or running an analysis needs free access — one click in the Help menu, and it stays with the machine. If you've done either of these jobs by hand, I'd genuinely like to hear what we got wrong.

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2mo ago

Maker

Bhushan here - I built the storage half, so let me add to Arun's note.

Sizing a battery looks like an arithmetic problem from outside: energy in, energy out, divide. What makes it hard is that a battery's value is not an annual average - it is the sequence of decisions it made. Charge, hold, or discharge, every fifteen minutes, for a year, against generation that moved and a contract that only asks whether you delivered. Model that annually and you get a number you cannot defend in a lender's room.

So BESS Desktop simulates the decision at fifteen-minute intervals across a full year, and the financial model then re-runs against that simulated dispatch rather than an assumed availability figure. It will also search for the solar / wind / battery mix itself instead of you entering candidates one at a time.

One thing I will not claim: third-party validation. We do not have it yet. The model is fully visible instead, so you can check it against your own numbers.

Storage questions in this thread are mine - ask me anything.

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2mo ago

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