RatedPower Review 2026: Fast Utility Design, $15k+ Price

RatedPower is the tool utility-scale developers reach for when a land parcel needs to become an engineering package before a tender closes. Built in Madrid in 2017, acquired by Enverus in September 2022, and sold under the product name pvDesign, it does one job with unusual completeness: you draw a site boundary, set your civil and electrical criteria, and it returns a plant layout plus roughly 300 pages of engineering documentation in a single run. We have used it alongside our own design stack at Heaven Green Energy across 200+ MW of installed solar, and this review gives it a score, a price, and a plain answer on who should actually buy it.

Direct answer. RatedPower scores 33 out of 50 on our 5-axis bench. It is the highest scorer on our bench for automated utility-scale plant design, and the only tool we have benched that ships a full engineering document set in hours. Pricing is quote only, industry-observed above $15,000 per seat per year. Buy it if you screen greenfield sites above 5 MW. Skip it for rooftop work.

Two things make this review worth reading rather than the vendor page. First, we score the tool where it genuinely wins and say so without hedging. Second, we publish the axes, so you can disagree with our weighting and re-score it yourself.

What RatedPower Is

RatedPower is a cloud platform for the conceptual and basic engineering of utility-scale photovoltaic plants. The product is pvDesign. The company was founded in 2017 by Andrea Barber, Miguel Angel Torrero and Juan Romero, and by the time of the Enverus acquisition in September 2022 it counted 1,400 users and about 20,000 projects representing 43 GW of designed capacity. Enverus is an energy data and analytics company, and the acquisition placed pvDesign next to Enverus land, power market and interconnection queue data.

The 5-Axis Review Bench

We score every design platform on the same five axes, each out of 10, for a total out of 50. The axes are published so the score is auditable. Design and simulation depth measures the physics and the layout engine. Compliance and documentation output measures what you can hand to a lender, an EPC contractor or an authority. Proposal and sales workflow measures customer-facing output. Price against value measures cost per useful outcome, not headline cost. Support and onboarding measures time to first competent design.

Axis	What it measures	RatedPower score
Design and simulation depth	Layout engine, terrain, electrical calculation, yield	9 / 10
Compliance and documentation output	SLD, BOQ, cable schedules, report set, editability	10 / 10
Proposal and sales workflow	Customer-facing proposal, e-sign, finance, CRM	3 / 10
Price against value	Cost per useful outcome across a real team	4 / 10
Support and onboarding	Time to first competent design, training, docs	7 / 10
Total		33 / 50

The 10 on documentation is not generous. It is the highest score we have given any tool on that axis. The 3 on proposal workflow is not a criticism of a failed attempt, because RatedPower never attempted it. The 4 on price is where the score is genuinely lost, and we explain that next.

Pricing

RatedPower does not publish a rate card. Every deal is quote only through Enverus sales, and there is no self-serve tier, no free plan and no month-to-month option that we could confirm. That is a real answer, not a dodge, and any page giving you an exact list price for pvDesign is not sourcing it from Enverus.

What we can report is what the market observes. Enterprise quotes for a single pvDesign seat commonly land above $15,000 per year, and the figure most often repeated by developers who have been through procurement is around $30,000 per seat per year for a full-featured enterprise agreement. Multi-seat deals are negotiated, and the per-seat rate falls as seat count rises. Treat both numbers as industry-observed estimates, not list price.

Cost item	RatedPower	Note
List price	Not publicly listed	Quote only via Enverus
Observed single seat	$15,000+ per year	Industry-observed estimate
Observed enterprise seat	around $30,000 per year	Industry-observed estimate
Free tier	✗ None	Demo only
Proposal tool included	✗ No	Second tool required
Lender-grade simulation included	Partial	PVsyst still commonly requested

That stacking is the honest cost picture. Our own solar design software pricing breakdown walks through how a two-tool or three-tool stack compares against a single bundled licence across a five-person team.

What RatedPower Does Best

Speed from boundary to engineering package. This is the axis RatedPower scores highest on across our bench, and we will state it plainly: for a developer screening greenfield sites, nothing rooftop-first comes close.

You upload a site polygon and a terrain model, choose module and inverter, set your civil criteria (maximum slope, road widths, setbacks) and your electrical criteria (voltage levels, transformer size, cable derating), and the engine returns a complete plant. Not a sketch. A layout with roads, a medium-voltage collection network, a substation position, cable schedules, a bill of quantities, low-voltage and medium-voltage single line diagrams, terrain cut and fill, and a yield report. The set runs past 300 pages and exports in editable formats and in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, per RatedPower’s published product documentation.

Utility-scale PV is now the largest single source of new generating capacity added worldwide each year, per the IEA’s solar PV tracking, and the developers building it are constrained by screening capacity rather than by drafting quality. The second real strength is iteration count. Because a run takes minutes rather than a week of drafting, a developer can test twenty configurations against one site. Different tracker pitch, different DC to AC ratio, different transformer sizing, different road strategy. That is where the value actually sits, and it is not something a general design tool replicates by adding features.

The third is the Enverus data pairing. Since the 2022 acquisition reported by PV Tech, pvDesign sits inside a company that also sells land, power price and interconnection queue data. For a US developer running site selection, that adjacency is genuinely useful and none of the independent design vendors on our bench offers an equivalent.

Where RatedPower Falls Short

Four real limitations, none of them strawmen.

It is the wrong tool below the multi-megawatt scale. pvDesign is built for utility-scale plants above 1 MW, and in our experience the workflow only pays back somewhere above 5 MW. As of August 2026 the vendor’s published feature list covers no rooftop obstruction workflow, no residential workflow and no 3D roof from a satellite address. A 200 kW factory rooftop in Morbi is not a small version of a 50 MW plant, and in our experience treating it as one produces a layout the installation crew ends up redrawing.

Quote-only enterprise pricing gates it to a specific buyer. No published price means no way to budget before a sales conversation, and no way for a five-person EPC to try it. That fits an enterprise sales motion, and it removes the tool from consideration for much of the market.

No proposal or sales layer that we could find. The output is engineering documentation for engineers, and as of August 2026 the published feature set lists no customer-facing proposal. Anything a landowner, an offtaker or a financier reads in a persuasion context is built elsewhere.

Lenders still ask for PVsyst. pvDesign produces a competent energy yield estimate, but on most projects we have touched, the technical advisor still wants a PVsyst file. Our comparison of PVsyst against the cloud platforms covers why that convention persists even where the physics is comparable.

Verdict. RatedPower is a specialist that is excellent at its specialism. It is worth enterprise money to a team whose bottleneck is greenfield screening throughput, and worth nothing to a team whose bottleneck is closing rooftop customers.

Who Should Buy RatedPower

The reader for whom RatedPower is the correct purchase, and the correct purchase over SurgePV, is a utility-scale developer or IPP screening more than roughly fifteen greenfield sites a year, each above 10 MW, with an in-house engineering team.

For that reader the arithmetic is not close. If pvDesign removes two weeks of drafting per site across fifteen sites, a $30,000 seat has paid back several times over on labour alone, before you count the deals that were only bid because the package landed in time. Add the Enverus data adjacency for US site selection and the case gets stronger. We would not argue that reader into a cheaper tool.

A second buyer with a genuine case is an owner’s engineer or technical advisory practice that needs a fast, defensible independent layout to check a developer’s own numbers. Speed of a second opinion is the product there, and pvDesign delivers it.

Comparing utility-scale tools? Our ranked breakdown of utility-scale solar design software puts pvDesign next to PVcase and PVsyst on terrain, tracker and bankability. Talk to our engineering team if you want the ground-mount view from an EPC that builds them.

Who Should Not

Everyone whose median project is a roof. That is most of this industry.

1. 1
   Residential installers. There is no roof obstruction workflow and no customer proposal. Look at residential solar design software instead.
2. 2
   C&I EPCs under 5 MW. The setup overhead per project exceeds the drafting it saves. A bundled cloud platform closes the same work faster.
3. 3
   Teams that need one licence to cover design and sales. pvDesign will always be half of a two-tool stack.
4. 4
   Anyone who cannot commit before trying. No self-serve tier means procurement risk sits entirely with you.

If you fall in that group, the tools worth shortlisting are covered in our ranked guide to the best solar design software, and the migration path specifically off pvDesign is in the RatedPower alternative comparison. Three sibling reviews in this series cover the tools most often bought alongside or instead of pvDesign: our PVsyst review for the bankability report, our Aurora Solar review for rooftop and C&I design, and our Scanifly review for drone-based as-built capture.

RatedPower vs SurgePV

Disclosure, stated plainly. SurgePV is a sister product of Heaven Green Energy, and we run it on our own EPC projects. That gives us operating detail most reviewers do not have, and it also gives us a commercial interest. Read the table with both facts in view.

Axis	RatedPower	SurgePV	Honest call
Utility-scale automated layout	9	7	RatedPower. Terrain-aware roads and MV network are stronger.
Engineering document set	10	8	RatedPower on volume and depth of the package.
Rooftop and C&I design	2	9	SurgePV. RatedPower does not compete here.
Proposal and sales workflow	3	9	SurgePV. RatedPower has no proposal layer.
Published price	Not listed	$1,299 per user per year, 5-User Team	SurgePV, on transparency alone.
Shading simulation	7	9	SurgePV runs 8,760-hour module-level shading.
Drone or as-built capture	✗	✗	Neither. Scanifly owns that job.
Structural stamping	✗	✗	Neither. Both need an engineering partner.
Racking component database	Moderate	Thin	RatedPower. SurgePV’s racking database is its weakest database.
Brand recognition with lenders	Established	Thin since 2025 launch	RatedPower. SurgePV is new and a technical advisor may ask about it.

Those last four rows are the ones that matter for honesty. SurgePV has no drone capture, no structural stamping, a racking database noticeably thinner than its module and inverter databases, and thin brand recognition because it launched in 2025. On pure utility-scale terrain automation, RatedPower is ahead. Where SurgePV wins for the majority reader is scale range and bundling: one licence covers a 3 kW rooftop and a 20 MW ground mount, with utility-scale design and customer proposals in the same file, at a published price.

How Heaven Green Energy Uses This In Practice

Our own workload is mostly Gujarat rooftop and C&I, with ground-mount projects a minority of project count and a large share of megawatts. That shape decides the tool split, and it is probably close to yours.

For anything under 5 MW we design in SurgePV, end to end, because the same file produces the shadow analysis, the single line diagram and the customer proposal. On ground-mount work above that, a RatedPower-class tool earns its place at the concept stage, where the question is how many configurations fit the parcel rather than how one configuration performs. We then take the chosen layout into detailed engineering, and for stamped structural and civil packages we work with Heaven Designs ground-mount design, which no design software replaces.

One field observation worth passing on. On a 4.2 MW ground mount in Saurashtra, the automated layout gave us a road plan that was correct on paper and unbuildable in monsoon, because the software optimised for cut and fill volume and not for drainage during a 200 mm rainfall day. The tool was not wrong. It was answering the question we asked. Automated plant design saves drafting weeks, and it does not save you from site knowledge.

Here is how our engineering team pairs software with delivery:

• Ground Mount Solar Park covers utility-scale and captive ground-mount EPC across Gujarat and western India.
• Industrial Solar EPC covers 100 kW and above turnkey projects with performance guarantees.
• Solar EPC services covers design, supply, installation and commissioning under one contract.
• Solar Calculator covers quick sizing and payback before any design work starts.

For engineers who want to understand the electrical side of a large plant layout before choosing software, the Qbits Energy inverter sizing guide is a good starting point, and our own single line diagram glossary entry explains what the SLD output should contain.

RatedPower is a good product with a narrow, well-defended job, and this RatedPower review ends where it started: buy it for greenfield screening throughput above 5 MW, and buy something else for everything below that line.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is RatedPower worth the price in 2026?

For a utility-scale developer screening more than fifteen greenfield sites a year above 10 MW, yes. If pvDesign removes two weeks of drafting per site, an observed $15,000 to $30,000 seat pays back on labour alone within a year. For a C&I or residential EPC it is not worth the price at any level, because the workflow does not fit projects under roughly 5 MW and there is no proposal output. Our bench gives it 33 out of 50, with the points lost almost entirely on price and sales workflow.

How much does RatedPower cost?

RatedPower does not publish a rate card, and pricing is quote only through Enverus. There is no free tier and no self-serve plan. Industry-observed enterprise deals start above $15,000 per seat per year, with around $30,000 per seat commonly reported for full enterprise agreements. Multi-seat contracts are negotiated and the per-seat rate falls with volume. As of August 2026 we could not find a published price for pvDesign from Enverus, so treat any exact figure you are shown as an unverified third-party estimate.

Who owns RatedPower now?

Enverus, the energy data and analytics company, acquired Madrid-based RatedPower in September 2022. The product name pvDesign continued after the acquisition. At the time of the deal RatedPower had 1,400 users and about 20,000 projects representing 43 GW of designed capacity. The main practical consequence is that pvDesign now sits alongside Enverus land, power price and interconnection queue data, which is useful for US site selection.

Can RatedPower design rooftop solar?

Not usefully. pvDesign targets utility-scale plants above 1 MW, and as of August 2026 its published feature set lists no rooftop obstruction workflow, no 3D roof build from a satellite address and no residential proposal output. A 200 kW factory rooftop is a different engineering problem from a 50 MW ground mount, not a smaller one. For rooftop work, look at bundled cloud platforms covered in our residential and commercial design software guides.

Does RatedPower replace PVsyst?

On most projects, no. pvDesign produces a competent energy yield estimate, but lender technical advisors still commonly request a PVsyst file, and that convention has held through 2026. Treat pvDesign as the layout and engineering package tool and PVsyst as the bankability artefact. Budget for both if your project is debt financed, because that is what the two-licence reality actually costs.

What is the minimum project size for RatedPower?

The published floor is 1 MW, and the practical floor is higher. In our experience the setup overhead per project only pays back somewhere above 5 MW, because the criteria you configure (road widths, slope limits, MV voltage levels, transformer sizing) are the same effort whether the plant is 2 MW or 60 MW. Below that, a general cloud design platform reaches a buildable layout faster.

Does RatedPower produce customer-facing proposals?

No. The output is engineering documentation written for engineers: layouts, single line diagrams, cable schedules, bills of quantities and yield reports. Anything a landowner, offtaker or financier reads in a persuasion context has to be built in a second tool. Teams typically pair pvDesign with a proposal platform or produce the commercial document manually in their own template.

Is RatedPower available in India?

Yes, pvDesign is sold globally and Indian developers do use it on large ground-mount work. Two caveats. The engineering document set is issued in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and it does not carry Indian regulatory logic such as ALMM module listing or state DISCOM interconnection rules, so that compliance work stays with your team. Our guide to solar design software in India covers which platforms carry that layer natively.