Release notes 2.53

📢 What's new

New features

Support for AutoCAD 2026

With this release, we are happy to announce compatibility with AutoCAD 2026 products. If you are still working on 2025 or older versions, don’t worry: we will continue to support those, too.

AC-BESS design in Ground Mount

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are a popular component in many modern solar power projects, allowing for storage and release of energy and fine-grained control of power flow. PVcase has now design support for AC-coupled BESS elements.

Adding these to your design is quite easy. In the Electrical devices tab, you will now see a subsection BESS, where you will find a new AC BESS button. Click on it to begin adding BESS elements to your design.

After clicking on the button, a new dialog box will open, where you can enter the rated power and capacity for your BESS elements.

Once you have configured the electrical parameters, you can start adding BESS elements. You can either select existing elements to edit or draw new ones. The first element you draw will be the template; every subsequent element will be placed as a copy of the first one.

You can add as many elements as you need with one click. When done, press ESC to exit drawing mode.

The next step will be to assign a transformer to your AC BESS elements. In this case, we already had a transformer in place, but you can press ENTER at this point to draw a new block, which will be converted to a transformer for BESS assignment.

After the transformer is selected, the AC BESS elements will be automatically assigned to it, and properly labelled. Labelling can be edited at any moment in our editor interface, which now also includes AC BESS elements.

The next step will be the generation of AC cabling between the BESS elements and the transformer. First, make sure that you have appropriately placed trench lines in the design, in case you are using them for cable pathing. Then, the procedure is completed by clicking the Generate AC cabling button.

This will apply AC cabling to the design, connecting the added AC BESS elements to the parent transformer.

The device overview is also updated with AC BESS elements, under the parent transformer. AC power for BESS is also included in the overview. From this interface, you can also rename your BESS elements at your convenience.

AC BESS elements are displayed in the SLDs in the same order as in the device overview. They are represented by a square icon with parallel bars of different sizes.

Finally, the BOM will now also include BESS data. In the main page you can have an overview of the amount of devices added, total power and capacity, and length of AC cabling from BESS to transformers.

There will also be a new tab showing the detailed cable length from each AC BESS to transformer connection.

Remember that, if you reuse the same electrical configuration for your AC BESS to transformer layouts, you can also use our electrical copy-paste functionality to quickly replicate this design wherever you need in your project!

Experimental preliminary electrical design flow

We are experimenting with a novel approach to quick preliminary electrical design by adding a new preliminary mode. This mode aims to reduce early design time as much as possible through automation of electrical layout.

Please note that this is an experimental mode, and we need your feedback for continuous improvement!

To begin, you will be asked which mode you would like to start your design in. Preliminary electrical design will use the experimental automated mode, while Detailed electrical design will return you to your usual PVcase experience.

Once you make your selection, it will be saved on your application. However, you can always switch back and forth between modes, by using the corresponding button on the top right corner of the electrical devices interface.

The first thing you will notice is that the preliminary design interface will only show you one tab — Electrical devices — and that it has been quite simplified.

Stringing is still available and will work exactly as before. However, the process of adding and connecting electrical devices only requires a few inputs: PV area selection, system type selection, strings per inverter, inverters per transformer and AC power.

Once you have configured your stringing pattern and PV area definitions, simply click the “Generate devices and cabling” button to automatically generate the electrical layout.

To perform cabling, the system will need trench lines. You will be prompted to either select existing lines, or create new ones.

The system will then use the default behavior of following trench lines to draw all the necessary cabling.

We welcome your feedback so we can continue to improve automatic layout generation!

Civil Analysis redesign & Ground grading by clearance

We made several improvements to the civil analysis user experience: the commands were organized into a more intuitive user flow, while adding a new grading capability and support for east-west mounts.

By taking into account multiple constraints for grading, you’ll be able to estimate grading volumes with more confidence - while reducing installation risk. Here's an overview of the changes:

Slope analysis

Starting from the Slope Analysis tab, we consolidated here the ability to Set Slope — previously in the Ground Grading tab. The single slope limit value input is used for both Indicate and Set slope.

Collision analysis & Ground Grading

This tab previously hosted the collision analysis functionality, which could be performed either according to pile reveals or ground clearance independently.

It wasn’t possible to check for both limits at once, and once a fitting configuration was found, it was necessary to head over the next tab to copy the limit values and actually perform the grading. Checking for collisions then required to return to the analysis tab, for then repeating the process - and so forth.
We decided to consolidate such user flow in a single tab, and to enable not only to check for multiple collisions simultaneously, but also to grade according to them.

Compared to the previous version, the inputs were rearranged and the diagrams made more readable, so that they are visually matched.
In the upper part of the interface, you perform a collision analysis according to the selected criteria: Ground Clearance and/or Pile reveal. The checkboxes on the left of the inputs allow you to select which criteria you want to apply for the analysis.
When multiple constraint violations might be detected for the same frame, the coloring will be applied for the active constraints in the same order you see in the interface: clearance first, pile reveals later.
The clearance constraint is applied to both sides: front/back for fixed-tilts and east-wests, and left/right for tracker systems.
Once you're ready to move to grading, you simply need to hit Grade and select the frames — or whole area — to which you want the same constraints applied. This means that if you want to analyze different constraints, and grade only to respect pile reveals, you can. This will keep the grading behavior you already know.

Finally, resetting the grading done on a given area can be done more explicitly via a dedicated reset action — previously accessible through a right click on the grading quantities.

We keep making improvements to our grading capabilities, and feedback is welcome!

Grading heatmap

The last tab in the Civil Analysis tool, is now focused on the Grading Heatmap, which works as you already know. The only difference in your workflow is that you'll need to select the area of interest before performing the analysis.

Export to KML

We made it easier for you to export your layout in a format that makes it easier to share it as an email attachment and visualize it in Google Earth.

Now it's possible to simply click Export to KML, from the export actions dropdown.

You’ll be prompted to pick between KML or KMZ format, and you can also set a default for the session. The export will automatically include all areas, fences, frames, transformers, and central inverters. It uses a simplified geometry whenever possible, to keep the exported file lighter.

Improvements

Multiple selection of desired cable cross-sections in voltage drop

Voltage drop in Ground Mount has previously been restricted to a single minimum value for reference. However, it is common that companies prefer to work with a predetermined set of cable cross-sections. In order to facilitate this choice, we have updated the Voltage Drop user interface to allow the selection of multiple desired cable cross sections.

When specific cable cross-sections are selected from this dropdown, the calculations will be restricted to consider only these sizes, and output the minimum recommended size per cable section that is included in the user-defined value list.

Minor updates & bug fixes

Stringing across multiple PV areas

Custom stringing now offers the possibility to string across different PV areas.

To achieve this, select the frames in different areas that you wish to string together, and draw the stringing pattern in the custom stringing window, as usual. Then you can apply the custom stringing pattern to any matching set of frames in the design.

SLD update for central inverters

Ground Mount’s single-line diagrams will now display central inverters in a different way.

The new central inverter SLD will comprise both the inverter and transformer components, wrapped in a dashed line box.