The STORMS project is supporting five areas of investigation.
Risk Assessment and Predictive Modeling
The objectives of this research thrust are to 1) create a risk index based on previous storm events to inform siting and design decisions; 2) create a risk map that predicts future risks based on climate models and photovoltaic (PV) capacity; and 3) estimate the impact of weather-forced PV outages on grid resource adequacy.
High Wind Risk to PV Production
Risk map shows that the risk of performance losses attributable to high wind is widespread across the US but greatest in coastal areas.
Storm-Hardened Design Strategies
Under this effort, the STORMS team is developing a set of resilience metrics to create the benchmarking standards needed to support robust component and system designs, evaluate post-storm damages, establish best practices and enable pre-event resilience reviews.
Hardware is critical to robust PV systems; the STORMS team is undertaking detailed mechanical analysis of component responses to different wind loads and other climatic stressors.
Disaster Response
Central to identifying and mitigating storm-induced damages is the ability to survey storm-exposed PV plants to document and collect data on the types and frequency of different failure mechanisms, correlated with plant metadata and storm type. This effort includes the long-term tracking of the performance of impacted plants.
Storm Database
Recognizing that the solar industry lacks an information-sharing platform, the STORMS project has created an incident-reporting website to enable the uploading and dissemination of data related to storm impacts on US utility-scale PV plants. Ultimately, this platform is intended to drive best practices—from site design to procurement to Operations and Maintenance (O&M)—and inform codes and standards to ensure resilient and available solar generation. The database is designed to be sortable and searchable by storm category, geographic location, and year and to be easy to access and to upload data.
Outreach and Knowledge Sharing
Success is measured by industry interest in and adoption of the recommendations and best practices developed by this team. To this end, the project informs standards development organizations to help identify gaps in certification and O&M requirements and provide data to inform new standards; disseminates technoeconomic models to inform investment and resilience strategies; and has an outreach and communications plan to disseminate project findings across multiple stakeholder groups.
Presentation on snow-mitigation for single-axis trackers at the IEEE PVSC conference in June, 2025 (left); opening panel session at the STORMS workshop in November 2025 (right).