GroundWork presents ‘Integrated Hail Resilience Strategy to Reduce Insurance Costs for Utility-Scale Solar Assets’ at PVRW 2026

Integrated Hail Resilience Strategy to Reduce Insurance Costs for Utility-Scale Solar Assets

The Approach: A Lifecycle Strategy for Hail Risk Management

Presented by Travis Morrison of GroundWork Renewables and Mandar Khodegaokar, Ashish Kothari, and Kendall Lilly of Recurrent Energy, this strategy breaks down hail risk management across three phases: pre-construction, construction, and operations.

Pre-construction: Know Your Risk

Before a project breaks ground, teams conduct localized hail climatology analysis and deploy Eyewitness hail sensors to establish baseline risk conditions and build an event record ahead of underwriter and lender discussions. Module selection is validated through independent hail-resilience testing, including test-to-failure with EL imaging at both normal and stow angles, and hail-mitigation planning ensures trackers, modules, and forecasting tools are properly matched to the site’s geographic risk.

Construction: Limit Your Exposure

During construction, when partially installed equipment is most vulnerable, a monitoring network is deployed before modules are exposed. Horizontal plane sensors are placed at 1/30 MWdc and plane-of-array sensors at 1/100 MWdc to capture ground-level hail characteristics and impact energy at module tilt angle.

Operations: Prove Your Resilience

Once operational, 24/7 automated hail monitoring, independent of SCADA systems, continuously tracks hail size distribution, kinetic energy, spatial extent, and temporal evolution. Regular tracker stow testing, post-event reporting, and a growing multi-year event database support insurance renewals, premium negotiations, warranty decisions, and O&M strategy.

The Results: 6x+ ROI with 8-Month Payback

• Insured loss expectation reduced from 35% to 5%
• $500K per year in premium savings
• $5M deductible reduction
• $1M+ per year in total annual risk reduction