Case Study: eSolar achieves faster development and lower installation costs for solar power stations with Altium Designer

Esolar Powers Up Design by using Altium Designer to Create Digital Controllers that Manage Solar Power Stations

eSolar, a Pasadena-based provider of utility-scale solar power plants that uses mass-production techniques, faced the challenge of controlling thousands of individually steerable mirrors (heliostats) across its modular power stations. The company needed a compact, multifaceted digital controller to drive motors, manage power and communications over a proprietary channel, and handle a complex network of interconnected modules — but had trouble finding a single, unified design tool that met all requirements and avoided long training cycles.

eSolar adopted Altium Designer’s unified electronics design environment, which combines software, hardware and programmable-hardware design with an intuitive interface and a single component database, allowing engineers to start work quickly and iterate without tool-imposed restrictions. The result was faster development (weeks shaved off training), reduced installation costs, higher operational efficiency of its solar stations, and a commercially viable control system that helps eSolar compete with traditional fossil-fuel-based generation.

eSolar

Carter Moursund

Vice President of Engineering