PHOENIX, AZ McCarthy Building Companies Inc. recently promoted Nayan Bhakta to director of Engineering and Procurement for the Southwest division's Renewable Energy team.

In this position, Bhakta plays a key role, providing nearly a decade of experience working on utility-scale solar projects ranging from $5 million to $600 million. He works closely with the preconstruction and estimating team to provide support for utility-scale solar projects, including overseeing design and procurement activities, energy production evaluations, as well as supervising installation.

Bhakta joined McCarthy in 2015 as preconstruction manager and he has been involved with EPC services on several solar projects including the 212MWdc Roserock Solar Plant in Texas and the 20 MWdc Silicon Ranch project in Tennessee. His versatile experience includes managing cost estimates and budgets, generating scopes of work and project schedules, and front-end design of photovoltaic power plants.

"Nayan has a wide array of experience on solar projects and has proven himself to be a strong leader on our team," said Scott Canada, senior vice president of the Renewable Energy team at McCarthy Building Companies.  "His ability to understand the planning, engineering and construction sides of solar projects has been an asset to our planning process and has resulted in quality projects completed on time, on budget and to the satisfaction of all parties involved."

Bhakta earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona.

Currently, McCarthy's Renewable Energy team is in the process of designing and installing 12 large-scale utility solar projects representing a total of more than 600 MW around the country. In addition to large-scale PV installations in Arizona, California, Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, Nevada, Utah, Tennessee, Georgia and Missouri, McCarthy has also worked with various school districts and universities throughout the West to install smaller-scale solar projects on school rooftops and parking structures.