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Twenty years of owner's engineering taught Orçun Başlak that a solar report is only as honest as the person who filled it in.
Orçun Başlak, co-founder of PVX.AI, has spent two decades between Turkish utility-scale development, owner's engineering and solar design software. In this episode he walks host Peter Pongracz through the parts of project development that rarely make a pitch deck: how grading actually gets decided, what satellite data can tell you about the ground before a surveyor arrives, and why two tools can produce the same yield number while only one is defensible.
The conversation gets specific on terrain. PVX.AI runs three grading methodologies — smoothing, pad grading, and a minimum-cut solver that shifts racks within reveal limits — and Orçun is blunt that the third often produces a surface nobody can build. He describes a client who asked for the least possible grading and said the site team could deal with the consequences. From there he moves to soil: satellite-derived compaction mapping calibrated against field checks, the transition zones between hard and soft ground that decide whether you ram a pile or drill and pour concrete, and an erosion model that tells you where the water will go before you design drainage.
He also covers why solar alone is the wrong answer to a grid-stability question, how tracker manufacturers check slope and reveal in incompatible ways, and the limits of yield simulation — irradiation varies three to six percent year to year, which swallows most of the accuracy any challenger tool claims over PVsyst. The sharpest section is about integrity: a module manufacturer flattening the incidence angle modifier in a PAN file to lift production numbers no financier would catch, and an inspection where fifty thousand modules turned out to share four electroluminescence images between them.
Connect with Orçun Başlak: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orcunbaslak/
LinkedIn PVX.AI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pvxai/posts/?feedView=all
Web: https://pvx.ai/
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Thank you for listening to Soliverse | The Future of Solar, the podcast for people building the future of solar, storage, and renewable infrastructure.
Each episode features grounded, unfiltered conversations with the people financing, developing, operating, and scaling real projects across the solar and clean energy ecosystem.
Soliverse exists to cut through noise, hype, and disconnected narratives and replace them with clarity, realism, and execution-focused insight for professionals who want to make smarter decisions, faster.
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