Leaf Wins $50,000 DOE Solar Prize Grant

Leaf has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's American-Made Solar Prize Ready! Round — funding that accelerates our work to eliminate the repetitive CAD drafting that bogs down solar engineering teams.

Why Solar Engineers Need Better Drafting Tools

If you've spent hours manually stringing modules in AutoCAD, drawing homerun paths from strings to inverters, or measuring cable lengths off the drawing for downstream voltage drop work, you know the problem. The solar industry has scaled rapidly, but the drafting workflows haven't kept up. Engineers and CAD technicians still rely on:

• Manual string layouts for rooftop and ground mount arrays
• Hand-routed homerun paths from string endpoints to combiners and inverters
• Hand-measured cable lengths copied into spreadsheets for BOM and voltage drop
• Repetitive tag and label placement for every panel group, string, and combiner

Some teams use AutoLISP routines or custom scripts to speed parts of this up, but those scripts are fragile, hard to maintain, and don't generalize across project types.

What We're Building with This Grant

The American-Made Solar Prize funding helps us develop drafting automation that understands solar drafting — not just generic CAD operations. Our work focuses on:

Automated Stringing for Rooftop and Ground Mount

Solar arrays with SolarEdge, Enphase, or string inverters require careful string sizing to meet manufacturer voltage windows and NEC voltage-window requirements. Branch automates the stringing process, grouping modules and routing DC conductors while respecting setbacks, obstructions, and the voltage-window constraints that govern legal string lengths.

K-Means Optimized Homerun Routing

Routing homeruns from string endpoints to combiners and inverters is the second-biggest CAD time sink after stringing itself. Branch uses K-means optimization to place inverters relative to string endpoints and route homeruns with clean 90-degree angles.

Circuit Length Export

Cable lengths drive bill-of-materials and voltage-drop calculations downstream. Branch measures actual polyline lengths from the drawing and exports them to CSV — feeding the engineer's voltage-drop spreadsheet without manual DIST measurements.

SolarEdge Designer PDF Import

Engineers designing SolarEdge systems do their work in SolarEdge's online Designer tool, then face the manual chore of copying the stringing plan from a PDF on a second monitor into AutoCAD. Branch imports SolarEdge Designer PDFs directly — converting that PDF data into CAD-ready output without the second-monitor copy work.

What We Don't Do

Engineering judgment stays with the engineer. Branch does not size wire, calculate voltage drop, generate single-line diagrams, produce permit packages, or perform structural analysis. Those are engineering decisions, and engineers should make them. We do the drafting; you do the engineering.

About the American-Made Solar Prize

The American-Made Solar Prize is a multimillion-dollar competition run by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). It's designed to accelerate solar innovation by connecting entrepreneurs with funding, mentorship, and national lab resources.

Being selected for the Ready! Round validates that the solar industry needs better drafting automation — and that Leaf is positioned to deliver it.

Thank you to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Solar Energy Technologies Office for their support.