[SAN JOSE, CA – October 22, 2025] VDE Americas, a global leader in technical advisory and catastrophic risk assessment services for the solar industry, today announced the internationalization of its innovative hail risk assessment and mitigation services. Since 2021, VDE Americas has offered location- and technology-specific financial hail risk exposure reports to solar project developers, owners, financiers, and insurers operating in the most hail-exposed region in the world—the continental United States. After supporting increased customer demand in Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa, the company has formalized the global expansion of its hail risk assessment service territory.
Severe convective storms—a meteorological category that produces tornadoes, high winds, and damaging hail—account for tens of billions of U.S. dollars of insured losses worldwide each year. As solar project deployments have increased in size, frequency, and geographic distribution, financial losses specifically due to hailstorm damage have risen in parallel. According to GCube, a specialty insurer with an international book of business, hail accounts for less than 2% of solar project insurance claims by count—but more than 50% of total financial losses. Since 2018, hail-related solar losses in the state of Texas alone have exceeded $600 million.
Originally developed to de-risk capital investments in utility-scale solar, VDE Hail Risk Intelligence provides state-of-the-art hail severity and frequency forecasts to support engineered financial loss assessments and risk mitigation responses. Because severe hail hotspots occur globally, VDE Americas leveraged its longstanding collaboration with Dr. John Allen, a professor of meteorology at Central Michigan University, to develop state-of-the-art data analysis and transposition tools capable of characterizing hailstorm frequency and severity anywhere in the world, the results of which can be applied to any industry susceptible to hail damage.
