Groove was created to support developers, IPPs, EPC contractors, and project finance teams during the phases in which design decisions directly impact investment profitability: pre-feasibility studies, auction participation, pipeline assessment, and the review of existing projects. Starting from real site constraints, the AI agent explores thousands of possible plant configurations in just a few minutes and identifies the best-performing solutions according to indicators such as IRR, NPV, and development fee.

The Department of Energy’s contribution specifically concerns the modeling and optimization of plant configurations through an approach that integrates energy yield, engineering constraints, and techno-economic metrics. In utility-scale photovoltaic plants, every technical choice involves trade-offs: increasing the number of modules per hectare may boost installed capacity but reduce specific yield due to shading effects; the adoption of trackers changes energy production, CAPEX, and optimal pitch; different tilt angles can affect not only the amount of energy produced but also the hourly revenue profile.

Through Groove, these trade-offs are analyzed systematically. Users enter the main site constraints, such as available land area, solar irradiation, and design limitations; the AI agent then provides optimized tilt and pitch configurations, comparisons between fixed structures and trackers, multi-year energy simulations, and a complete financial model including CAPEX, OPEX, hourly revenues, IRR, NPV, payback period, and development fee. Results can be accessed through an interactive dashboard that enables scenario comparisons, sensitivity analyses, and evaluation of the impact of key design variables.

«Multi-variable optimization of a photovoltaic plant requires accurate energy yield models and an objective function that integrates engineering and economics. Making the methods developed in our laboratories available to the market through a platform used for real-world projects is a concrete example of technology transfer»  commented Giampaolo Manzolini, Full Professor at the Department of Energy of Politecnico di Milano.

The collaboration highlights the Department’s expertise in energy systems, photovoltaic technology integration, and complex system optimization, transforming research outcomes into an operational tool for the solar sector. The goal is to reduce the time required to explore configuration options — from weeks of manual work to just minutes of computation — and to support faster, more transparent, and data-driven project decisions based on integrated techno-economic metrics.

«For a developer, the difference between one configuration and another can be worth millions of euros in NPV. Until now, this level of optimization was reserved for teams with internal modeling and computing resources. With Groove, and thanks to the research carried out by Politecnico di Milano, we are putting this level of analysis into the hands of anyone developing a utility-scale project» said David Moser, Managing Partner of Becquerel Institute Italia.