Profile Solar Solutions

Solutions for your Environment

Vegetative and Erosion Control Solutions for Solar Sites

Achieving sustainability goes beyond renewable power generation. Site performance is reliant on establishing a design-build plan that includes interconnectivity to the natural environment. Solar projects frequently face compliance hurdles for stormwater and erosion control. Profile is here to guide you over these hurdles.

Understanding Challenging Environments

Environmental factors can pose significant challenges to developers, operators, and construction partners of utility-scale solar sites, including hindering operations, causing construction delays, and potentially resulting in greater costs.

Profile Products offers the first-of-its-kind Integrated Mitigation Program for Assessment of Climate, Topography, and Soils (PV-IMPACTS), a comprehensive analysis of environmental risk mitigation and sustainable solar development. Utilizing geospatial factors, PV-IMPACTS remotely assesses erosion, soil health, regulatory and interrelated environmental inputs for existing and planned projects.

PV-IMPACTS empowers stakeholders such as utilities, developers, EPCs, and consultants to proactively identify potential concerns and address them through proper erosion control, stormwater management, and vegetation establishment best practices. The geospatial resource identifies additional project-specific risks and opportunities to facilitate community acceptance, regulatory compliance and empower informed decision-making for sustainable and cost-effective solar development.

Key Capabilities

Utilize PV-IMPACTS to:

• Erosion Risk Index: This custom-built index combines four key industry-validated drivers of erosion and stormwater runoff: rainfall erosivity, soil erodibility, slope gradient, and changes in rainfall erosivity due to climate change. Each factor is weighted and normalized on a 0-100 scale, providing a clear risk assessment value for each site.

• Soil Health Risk Index: This index assesses the site’s overall soil health by analyzing soil pH, soil organic matter (SOM) content, and sodium adsorption ratio (SAR). These factors influence nutrient uptake, soil moisture absorption, vegetation management, and runoff rates.

• Additional Risk & Opportunity Assessments: PV-IMPACTS offers insights to factors like flood potential, proximity to protected areas, and regulatory considerations. It also identifies opportunities for establishing native plant and pollinator habitats, quantifying potential cost savings and ecological benefits.

• Create an accurate assessment of the climactic, topographic and agronomic challenges facing the site.

• Mitigate erosion risk to operations, equipment and transmission infrastructure.

• Improve soil health to support sustainable vegetation establishment and reduce surface temperature for optimal photovoltaic performance.

• Revitalize and reclaim Brownfield Sites that face unique challenges and enhance public acceptance.

• Empower economic opportunities by utilizing pollinator-friendly native vegetation to potentially reduce maintenance costs and benefit surrounding agricultural communities.

About Profile PV-IMPACTS PV-IMPACTS ASSESSMENT REQUEST

Sustainability Spans From Soil to Sky


S.O.L.A.R. Fundamentals	Solar Site Development Challenges & Solutions	Earn A PhD in Solar Site Development

What We Do

Achieving sustainable vegetation relies on your ability to overcome the challenges that are unique to your specific solar site. Profile's solar specialists are here to help you navigate the planning, site preparation, and execution of your stormwater plan. Compliance and project closure starts at the ground level. As you create project development and renewable energy plans, Profile’s solar specialists are here to help you navigate the planning, site preparation, and execution.

• Establishing vegetation
• Erosion and stormwater management planning (SWPPP)
• Reducing maintenance
• Compliance and project closure
• Native and pollinator-friendly seed mixes
• Wildlife-friendly erosion control solutions
• Alternatives to replace topsoil and compost
• Navigating the 2022 EPA Construction General Permit
• Erosion & Sediment Control Guidelines

Profile is the global leading manufacturer of hydraulically applied erosion control and biotic soil technologies. Achieving global leadership means that our offerings go beyond product manufacturing. As a true partner in solar site development, we lace up our boots and get into the field with your team – offering soil testing, seed mix formulation, and execution planning to make your site development efficient.

5 Fundamentals

Establishing sustainable vegetation and receiving the earliest possible SWPPP compliance are the goals of every project. Profile’s S.O.L.A.R. Fundamentals are the surest way to get you there. Integrating them into a process that entails proper planning, documentation and execution ensures success and design safety on the projects you undertake.

Guiding you through each stage, we know your stakeholders are diverse. You are facing challenges of vegetation establishment for project closure (compliance), social pressures (acceptance), ecological (sustainability), and the need to protect your infrastructure (financial).

Understanding the stakeholders and the fundamentals of S.O.L.A.R. Site development is the only way to achieve the goals on your solar site development.

Proven Sustainability

The capital investment you have in a solar site demands efficiencies and performance. Profile Products’ ensures that your clean energy site performs from the ground up.

Our products are USDA Certified Biobased and face “cradle-to-gate” analysis to ensure what you deploy on your job site not only has a proven track record of performance, but also achieves the sustainability demanded of today’s renewable energy development.

From upcycling of industrial sites for renewable energy development to agrivoltaics practices on utility-scale or community solar garden projects, Profile Products has the specialty products and project experience to make clean energy generation come to life.

Challenge & Solution

Photovoltaics (PV) and bifacial solar generation sites face unique challenges. Sites are often an upcycling of industrial or retired farmlands. These sites are confronted with denuded and compacted or sandy soils. They may be contaminated or polluted, further impeding meaningful vegetation. In the end, you need vegetation establishment to be compliant with regulators, increase carbon sequestration, and more importantly to protect your equipment and investment.

Before	After

Find the right solution for your unique site challenges:

Challenge	Solution	Benefit
Rocky Soils (Low pH, Low Organic Matter, Low Fertility)	ProGanics	Promotes healthy soil with dramatic cost savings over topsoil
Erosion Risk & Challenging Vegetation Establishment	ProGanics DUAL	Cost-effectively revive soils and controls erosion in one pass
Critical Areas with Erosion Potential	ProMatrix / Flexterra	Proven〝spray on blankets〞save time and money versus rolled goods
Ponds/Ditches/Extreme Slopes	GreenArmor System	Provides a vegetated low-cost alternative to rip rap for concentrated flow areas with a natural appearance to increase public acceptance
Large Acreage Seeding/Dust Control	High-Performance and High-Efficiency hydraulic mulches	Meets your budgets and deadlines with convenient〝one-pass〞solutions

Benefits of Responsible Development

The measure of success on a solar site development project can be isolated to four simple objectives:

• Reduced Risk
• Public Acceptance of the Project
• Increased Efficiency and Performance
• Overcome Common Challenges Impacting Project Closure

The Five Fundamentals of the S.O.L.A.R. approach Ensures Protection and Ensures Compliance. Reduce the risk of stormwater causing erosion and damage to generation equipment by creating SWPPP plans that allow infiltration and manage concentrated flow. Hydraulically applied mulches offer benefits through dust control during the development process and gain public acceptance of the project as natural vegetation beautifies the landscape well beyond the development of the site, as well as reducing water usage, lowering maintenance needs and surface temperatures to improve the efficiency of the site and its operations.

A Notice of Termination is requires stormwater management and soil stabilization. But the possible benefits extend well beyond managing channelized flow or the banks of a detention pond. Greater environmental impact and site performance is possible with today’s natural technologies.

Learn About Vegetating Solar Sites

Successful and effective site plans start before ground is broken. Profile’s solar specialists encourage utility site developers to start with breaking ground for the purpose of a soil test.

Our team offers this as a complimentary service with the long-term benefit of remaining compliant, saving time and money in the development of the site, reducing maintenance, and gaining social acceptance with a natural appearance of the finished site.

Get a view of the solar development process and its benefits.

Join us for our solar presentation. Participate in a Lunch & Learn or virtual webinar and earn PDHs.

Where to Start

Getting started is easier than many think. Work with the Profile specialists to work through the five fundamentals of S.O.L.A.R. site development. We offer complimentary soil testing, native, pollinator and cover seed selection, and erosion plan guidance.

Your engineering team will be bolstered with a specialized team with the goal of minimizing soil loss, optimizing soil health and protecting valuable generation equipment.

Our biotic soil technologies and erosion control products offer industry-leading performance.

REQUEST A DEMO PV-IMPACTS ASSESSMENT REQUEST