Case Study: Hubei Electric Engineering Corporation achieves an optimized 80MW solar plant in rugged terrain—saving time and money with Bentley digital twin solutions

POWERCHINA Hubei Uses Digital Twins to Build Solar Power Plant in a Rugged Region

Hubei Electric Engineering Corporation (POWERCHINA Hubei) faced the challenge of designing and building an 80 MW ground-mounted photovoltaic power station in the rugged, hilly terrain around Guangshui while minimizing environmental impact, shading, and cost. Their initial design tools could not handle the thousands of unique panel supports, complex cabling routes, and terrain-driven adjustments, so they turned to Bentley and its suite of applications (ProjectWise, MicroStation, OpenBuildings, OpenUtilities Substation, SYNCHRO, iTwin.js) to enable a digital design approach.

Using Bentley’s applications to create a federated digital twin, the team automated placement and angling for 14,080 panels (keeping shading below 2%), optimized cabling and buried routes, shrank the booster station footprint to 1,181 m², and cut the access road by 4 km. The Bentley-enabled workflow saved CNY 1,000,000 from automated modeling, avoided 40 rework instances (saving CNY 800,000 and 20 days), reduced cabling costs by CNY 600,000, and accelerated construction by 30 days, resulting in an operational plant delivering renewable energy to Hubei.