February 11, 2025—San Jose, California-based VDE Americas, the global leader in technical advisory and catastrophic risk assessment and mitigation services for solar, today announced the launch of its VDE Hail Risk Atlas. Designed to forecast the economic risk of solar assets due to hail loss, VDE’s suite of Hail Risk Intelligence products and services is a leap forward for solar developers, insurers and investors, paving the way for more defensible, financeable and insurable projects. The VDE Hail Risk Atlas is available for use on the Esri ArcGIS platform.
Utility-scale solar facilities are critical sources of domestic power generation in the US. These assets, which can consist of thousands of acres of glass solar modules, are largely sited in the path of severe hailstorms. After a series of such hailstorms caused hundreds of millions in damages to US solar infrastructure, VDE created its Hail Risk Atlas. The new offering uses proprietary test data and on-site forensics to model the hail resiliency of today’s wide range of solar modules and the effect of mounting system tilt angle. Then, through advanced computer modeling coupled with ground-based radar and observational data, Hail Risk Atlas produces a wide range of hail risk maps and intelligence for use in assessing the risk of hail loss across the continental US.