Why Do Trackers Win in the Northeast and Midwest?

Arun Ramadass, Vice President, Operations

For years, developers building in the Northeast and Midwest reached for fixed-tilt racking by default. Today, trackers make up roughly 95% of our project portfolio, and the remaining fixed-tilt work is almost entirely on landfills (where the cap can't be penetrated for tracker foundations). 

What’s behind this massive change, and why are trackers now the more cost-effective solution in regions where they were once barely considered? 

Once, Extreme Weather = Fixed-Tilt

Developers weren't wrong to favor fixed-tilt in colder, windier, hillier states. Trackers’ moving components have to withstand heavy snow and high winds in the Northeast and Midwest. With earlier technology, this resilience required foundations on flat ground. That was possible in plains states like Nebraska and Kansas, but most of the Northeast and Great Lakes region slopes and rolls instead. 

Putting trackers on uneven ground meant grading the site first, and grading is expensive. The added energy from sun-tracking just wasn’t enough to offset the cost of extra earthwork and weather risk, so fixed-tilt often came out ahead.

What Changed: Stowing and Terrain-Following Technology

Three developments moved trackers past those limits, and into the Northeast.

Wind stow and snow shedding came first. Wind sensors monitor incoming weather and rotate the tracker into a protective position before a storm hits, so the array rides out conditions that once threatened it. 

After the storm, snow shedding takes over: the tracker tilts back and forth to slide snow off the panels, keeping production up and reducing manual maintenance costs. Tracker companies like NEXTPower, GameChange Energy, and Array Technologies all publish their wind, snow, and snow-shedding specifications, and the features now ship as standard.

Terrain-following trackers closed the last gap. These systems tolerate far more uneven ground than earlier designs, so an EPC can follow the site's contours instead of having to grade it flat. With massive reductions to earthwork expenses (and scheduling), the cost argument that kept trackers out of these regions disappears.

Latitude turns out not to be the constraint developers sometimes assume. Tracker projects even run well into Canada, where winters cut production but strong summers carry the year. Because the panels track the sun rather than sitting at a fixed angle, northern sites hold up better than a fixed-tilt comparison would suggest.

Castillo's Midwest project portfolios show how routine this has become. For instance, even with annual high snow loads and wind coming off Lake Michigan, our Illinois projects still return lower LCOE with trackers than without. The trackers’ hail-stow and snow-shedding capabilities protect the panels and keep production up better than fixed-tilt arrays, making trackers the obvious choice. 

Technology Advanced - Now, It’s the Engineering

The tracker-versus-fixed decision no longer drives projects in the Northeast and Midwest the way it once did. Where engineering judgment matters now is in execution: sizing the structure for site-specific loads, complying with local code, and coordinating the electrical, civil, and structural work so the design holds together. 

New technology cleared old barriers. Now, figuring out how to optimize these new capabilities for each project is an exciting challenge – the sort of challenge that makes our jobs interesting, and brings us to work every day!

Get in touch with a technical expert at Castillo Engineering for support with your utility-scale solar projects.