VDE Hail Risk Atlas case study featuring the Clearway Energy Group

Clearway Energy Group, one of America’s leading renewable energy providers, faced a critical challenge in its utility-scale solar development: balancing optimal solar power generation with asset protection from severe hailstorms. The solution came through an innovative collaboration with VDE Americas, influencing how Clearway evaluates and protects solar installations worth hundreds of millions of dollars using digital maps.

The challenge and solution

Traditional site assessment methods left crucial gaps in understanding hail risk, a leading cause of solar asset failure and financial loss. VDE Americas provided Clearway with sophisticated mapping technology that transformed its approach to hail risk assessment. The solution enables staff to quickly assess hail risk at site locations under consideration using a platform already in use by Clearway—namely, web-based ArcGIS map layers hosted by Esri, the world's leading geospatial software provider. Specifically, VDE Americas provides hail risk map layers via an organization-level subscription that combine return interval analysis using radar-based hailstorm forecasting, which predicts the frequency of severe hail events with the resiliency of specific solar panels to hail damage, tracker stow capabilities to defend against hail, and financial impact modeling across the continental United States.

VDE Americas

VDE Hail Risk Atlas map layers

Key hail risk map layers available via the ArcGIS Marketplace include:

Maximum expected hailstone diameters over 40-, 100-, and 500-year periods.
Probable maximum loss (PML) and average annual loss (AAL) estimates for major solar panel types and tracker angle combinations, facing into or away from wind.
Radar-based return intervals showing the frequency in years sites would experience one or more storms with hailstones of specific sizes of concern or greater.

Clearway Energy Group

The results

By integrating VDE's digital maps into its project development process, Clearway achieved quantifiable improvements in its site selection and asset protection strategies. The system allowed the organization to:

Understand potential hail-related losses through data-driven site selection.
Optimize solar panel and tracker selections based on location-specific hail defense capabilities.
Support insurance and financing negotiations via a combination of detailed risk documentation and operational hail monitoring and stow implementation.
Streamline analysis timelines through faster site assessment by eliminating the need to wait for sitespecific hail loss estimation reports.

Looking forward

The successful implementation of digital hail risk mapping has established a new standard for hail risk assessment in utility-scale solar development. As the industry continues to expand, Clearway's experience demonstrates how advanced weather risk modeling can protect investments and optimize performance across large-scale renewable energy portfolios.

This approach has had measurable financial impacts: solar projects assessed and optimized using VDE's solution have improved durability during severe hailstorms, while more accurate hail risk assessment has led to optimized insurance coverage and reduced operational uncertainties in project pro formas. For Clearway, this translates into more resilient solar assets and enhanced long-term project value.