Nearly two decades of field-validated energy modeling, born inside the companies that built utility-scale solar and trusted today by the developers, EPCs, independent engineers, and lenders who finance it.
PlantPredict was born inside First Solar in 2012, field-tested on gigawatts of operating capacity, and acquired by Terabase Energy in 2021.
PlantPredict is a cloud-based energy modeling and plant-design platform built specifically for utility-scale photovoltaics. It produces the bankable P50/P90 energy yields that developers, EPCs, independent engineers, and lenders depend on to finance and build solar, delivered through a modern web interface and a full REST API, with openly documented algorithms any engineer can audit. Nearly two decades in the making, it pairs the modern architecture of a new platform with the validation history of an incumbent.
Algorithms are openly documented and the REST API is fully featured, so independent engineers can audit the methodology line by line instead of trusting a black box.
That transparency is exactly why lenders, IEs, and developers are comfortable building bankable energy yields on PlantPredict, the opposite of the closed, desktop-bound tools the industry has leaned on for decades.
PlantPredict's methods are peer-reviewed and shared with the field through the PV Performance Modeling Collaborative (PVPMC) and other open efforts to advance solar performance science.
The aim isn't a walled garden. It's to raise the accuracy standard for the whole industry and serve as the neutral, validated reference every party in a deal can agree on.
PlantPredict is Terabase Energy's flagship performance engine, but it's built for the entire market, not locked to any one vendor's hardware or workflow.
Terabase relies on it internally to power its own design software, SCADA, and performance benchmarking, continuously checking real plant output against predicted yield and holding the model to the same standard our customers do.
The engineering roots of PlantPredict trace back to OptiSolar, an early utility-scale solar pioneer building some of the first tools purpose-made to predict the energy output of large PV plants.
First Solar, one of the world's largest solar manufacturers, acquires OptiSolar's utility-scale solar business and engineering team, bringing that energy-prediction expertise in-house.
PlantPredict's methodology is peer-reviewed at the 42nd IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference. Across 51 equivalent simulations, its energy-yield results differ from the incumbent tool by a mean of just 0.13%, benchmarked against nearly 1 GW of operating capacity.
First Solar opens PlantPredict to the broader industry with a free license, making a bankable, field-validated utility-scale energy model widely accessible for the first time rather than confined to one company's internal teams.
First Solar adopts PlantPredict's energy predictions as the contractual basis for EPC and O&M performance guarantees on operating plants, and independent engineering firms including Leidos validate its outputs as equivalent to the industry-standard tools lenders already trust.
PlantPredict introduces paid subscription tier, proving that the industry valued independent, high-fidelity energy modeling enough to pay for it alongside incumbent tools.
Terabase Energy acquires PlantPredict from First Solar, bringing the platform and its core team in-house and accelerating investment in cloud infrastructure, the API, and the modeling engine.
Terabase extends PlantPredict beyond energy prediction, adding Terrain Pro for earthwork assessment and Voltage Pro for simulation-based string sizing, alongside major modeling upgrades in Version 11.
PlantPredict 3D unites energy modeling with terrain-aware 3D visualization, moving past the 2D assumptions still common in legacy desktop tools and giving engineers a true digital model of the site.
A decade after its public release, PlantPredict marks ten years as an open, field-validated standard, now backed by a new round of independent bankability studies and a cloud-native, API-first platform built for the largest projects in the pipeline.
PlantPredict is led, built, and maintained by solar industry veterans, performance scientists, and software developers at Terabase Energy, several of whom have worked on the platform across both its First Solar and Terabase chapters. A few of the people driving it forward:
Matt Campbell
CEO & Co-Founder, Terabase Energy
Thang Le, PE
VP PlantPredict, Terabase Energy
Jason Spokes, PE
Sr. Product Director, PlantPredict
David Spieldenner
Director of Sales, PlantPredict
Arthur Onno, PhD
Principal Performance Engineer, PlantPredict
Isaac Bocage
Inside Sales Associate, PlantPredict
PlantPredict is the product of many hands. Over nearly two decades, dozens of engineers, scientists, and solar professionals have shaped it into the platform it is today. We're especially grateful to the original team at First Solar, whose work laid the foundation, and to the many contributors who have since moved on to companies across the solar industry. Their expertise and dedication live on in every model PlantPredict runs.
Past PlantPredict contributors reconnecting at PVPMC 2026
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PlantPredict is built and maintained by a team of solar engineers, software developers, and energy modelers at Terabase Energy.