Energies Media
At Fresno’s Northeast Surface Water Treatment Plant, the solar array looks wrong at first glance. There are no steel frames, no elevated rows tilting toward the sun — just panels lying flat on the ground, as if someone forgot to finish the installation.
Nothing is missing. That unconventional design is the point. Since coming online in late March 2026, the frameless, ground-level system has been delivering electricity to the city at a rate below what the local utility charges — and quietly outperforming the energy output anyone expected.
ForeFront Power achieved commercial operation of the first Erthos Earth Mount Solar system at Fresno’s Northeast Surface Water Treatment Plant in late March 2026. It’s more than a ribbon-cutting moment — it marks the debut of a fundamentally different approach to building solar infrastructure at scale.
The core idea is deceptively simple. Instead of erecting rows of steel-racked panels angled toward the sky, Erthos places solar modules directly on the ground. No structural steel, no racking, no elevated frames. The entire support system that conventional solar developers take for granted is just gone.
That elimination isn’t a shortcut — it’s the design. Erthos engineered a modular, repeatable system built specifically to strip out complexity and reduce the cost per watt of solar electricity. The Fresno installation is the first proof that the concept works at commercial scale.
The Northeast Surface Water Treatment Plant is one piece of a larger effort. ForeFront Power developed a 27 MW-DC portfolio across three City of Fresno Department of Public Utilities sites, pairing solar generation with smart battery storage. The Earth Mount system at the water treatment plant is the portfolio’s most unconventional component — and its most closely watched.
The decision to try something new wasn’t born from curiosity alone. It came from a cost crisis.
ForeFront Power first approached Erthos in 2023, when inflation and supply chain disruptions drove the price of labor and materials sharply higher. A traditional ground-mounted system at the Fresno site would have required steel racking, installation labor, and expensive civil upgrades to prepare the ground beneath it. Each added cost had a direct consequence for the city.
Under the 20-year Power Purchase Agreement, ForeFront Power owns the system and sells electricity back to Fresno at a fixed rate. A more expensive build meant a higher rate — potentially pushing the project above what the utility already charged, and eliminating the financial case for doing it at all.
“Erthos helped us avoid significant, expensive civil upgrades, as well as the cost of steel for racking and the labor to install that racking,” said Erinne Davis, senior project manager at ForeFront Power. “Realizing these savings on the installation is what enabled the project at this site to move forward.”
By switching to the Erthos system, ForeFront Power sidestepped those costs entirely. The city gets a fixed electricity rate below the utility’s. The project survives. That’s the financial logic the Earth Mount design makes possible.
Eliminating steel solves a cost problem. The Erthos architecture also solves a density problem — one that conventional solar design hasn’t fully cracked.
Traditional tilted-rack systems require row spacing to prevent panels from shading each other as the sun moves across the sky. That spacing consumes land without generating power. Erthos removes the tilt, removes the spacing requirement, and packs panels as tightly as the site allows. The result, according to the company, is the highest energy density of any solar architecture currently available — more capacity on the same footprint, which matters enormously when a developer is trying to make a project work on a constrained site.
The flat-mounted panels also adapt to terrain in ways tilted systems can’t. The Erthos design accommodates ground contours of up to 15% slope, meaning the array can follow a site’s natural topography without requiring extensive grading. At Fresno, that flexibility was part of what made the location viable in the first place.
Across the full three-site portfolio, the combined savings from lower construction costs and higher energy density are projected to deliver more than $122 million in ratepayer savings through 2045.
Putting panels on the ground introduces an obvious challenge: dust and debris accumulate faster, and conventional cleaning equipment isn’t designed for a flat, ground-level array.
Erthos anticipated this. Their solution is the ErthBot — an autonomous cleaning robot equipped with dry nylon brushes, custom-designed for Earth Mount Solar arrays. Each unit cleans more than 3.5 MW-DC of solar panels per deployment, which Erthos describes as the most cost-effective cleaning method for large-scale PV arrays in the industry. The ErthBot deploys nightly as needed, sweeps the array, then returns to its charging dock. No water, no crew, no interruption to generation.
Under the Energy Services Agreement between Erthos and ForeFront Power, Erthos handles all operations and maintenance of the ErthBot — built into the service structure, not added on as an afterthought.
The most important question about any first-of-its-kind system is whether it actually performs. Early data from Fresno suggests it does — and then some.
Since entering commercial operation, the system has averaged 101% of expected energy production and has already delivered 862 MWh of electricity to the City of Fresno. Beating your own projections from day one is a meaningful signal, especially for a technology that skeptics might expect to underperform.
Both ForeFront Power and Erthos say the early results strengthen their confidence in the system’s long-term outlook. The numbers matter beyond this single site. If Earth Mount Solar can consistently hit or exceed production targets, it reframes what’s possible for solar development on sites that conventional racking would make too expensive to build — and as construction costs stay elevated and suitable land grows harder to find, that’s a question the industry can’t afford to ignore.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.
Carlos is an engineer with strong expertise in technical and industrial topics. He previously worked at international companies such as Siemens and is multilingual.

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