Utility-scale solar farm — screw piles for 40,000 PV modules

A 65 MW utility-scale solar farm near Bendigo required 6,200 galvanised steel screw piles to support approximately 40,000 bifacial PV panels mounted on single-axis trackers. The program allowed 12 weeks for piling; we finished in 11.

Screw piles are the right answer for utility-scale solar almost every time. The ground is typically dry paddock, the loads per pile are modest (15–40 kN compression and 20–60 kN tension from wind), the torque-capacity correlation gives real-time quality verification (see our helical pile torque article), and the absence of concrete means the panel-mounting crew follows the piling crew by a single day.

We ran three compact track-mounted screw-pile rigs across three sections of the array. Every pile was installed to the design minimum torque and logged electronically with its row-and-column ID, so the as-built pile record map matched the panel-mounting drawings one-for-one. Piles that hit refusal short of the nominal embedment were verified by the site engineer on the rig-mounted torque readout and either cleared to work or re-installed at an offset — decisions made in the field, not in a week-long RFI cycle.

Solar-farm piling rewards production-rate thinking. Owned compact rigs, owned crew, torque logs issued nightly, and an in-house engineer on speed-dial for the refusal calls. That is how a solar farm gets piled on program.