PROJECT STATS

• COMPLETION DATE

  June 2020

• Location

  Fort Bend County

• SERVICES

  Hydrology and Hydraulics

  Site Civil Services

  Surveying

• 1,700

  Acres

• 1,000s

  of solar panels

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Cutlass Solar is a 1,700-acre solar panel farm in Fort Bend County located near multiple creeks, including  Fairchilds Creek, Deer Creek, and Big Creek. Once the plant is operational, it aims to add nearly 140-megawatts of available power to the Houston area and power around 15,000-homes. A localized HEC-RAS 2D model and watershed 1D/2D model was prepared to determine on-site flow patterns, ponding depths, and the facility’s impact on nearby properties. The hydraulic analyses utilized Atlas 14 rainfall data.

SERVICE DETAILS

The facility will include thousands of pile-mounted solar panels across 1,500-acres of the property. Performing 2D models for each solar panel pile as an obstruction on the terrain across such a large area would have been difficult and time-consuming. Instead, our team determined the impact of installing the proposed solar panel piles by preparing a localized portion of the terrain surface and calibrating runoff land-use conditions to replicate the hydraulic results of modeling the individual piles on the terrain.