Glossary

Pile driving

Also: piling, post driving

Setting the steel posts that hold a solar farm's racking or trackers; one of the largest scopes on a solar site.

Most utility-scale solar arrays stand on steel piles, usually I-beams driven into the ground by a pile driver, at a rate of tens of thousands per hundred megawatts. Where the ground is rocky, piles may be pre-drilled or set in concrete.

Piling follows layout and staking and the civil work, and runs ahead of the racking and module crews. It is often its own subcontract, or done by a builder that self-performs it.