The 7 Reasons Why Solar Projects Fail

Solar development is hard today. 5 years ago, utilities were more interested in finding ways to get you interconnected. Building departments were less stringent on their requirements. Life was good in the solar space.

Then it wasn’t.

You’ve spent months trying to take a project from an idea or a knock on a farmer’s door to completion. You got their written option agreement in place. They’re excited to take some fallow land and turn it into a “cow” they can milk for 20-years with your solar PPA.

But things have come to a grinding halt.

And here are the 7 reasons why

1. You overlooked a significant 100-year flood plain survey required by the Army Corp of Engineers.
2. As you started your development plan, you missed a significant nuance in the county building code that prevents you from using 25% of the useable land you thought you could
3. It is month 9 and your investors want to know when you will get a signed PPA, as you are struggling to find an offtaker
4. You have invested $400,000 of your own money and you didn’t have a development plan, as you saw someone else do this in another state and they said it was easy and now you’re feeling despair
5. Your EPC costs keep rising with each surprise provided to you by the utility and the various layers of state and local building authorities which has pushed your target IRR for investors in the red zone.
6. The farmer you signed an agreement with wants to start receiving payments because word is out that other developers are offering him a sweeter deal and he wants to dissolve your agreement, throwing away all you have invested to date
7. You believed a PPA would be easy to get, then learned the queue and demand has outstripped the supply at the PPA rate you projected and now your projects economics won’t support the projects cash flow or target IRR, potentially torpedoing the deal

These are real situations that happen daily in the solar business. There are probably 30+ usual disaster elements that significantly contribute to the failure of solar development that are often ignored. These lead to countless sleepless nights and a tremendous injection of capital to keep things moving forward.

But what if you could avoid the 30 common reasons why solar projects fail in the first place?

Join 300+ people just like you that took the time to learn at a high level and got down in the weeds to uncover where their projects were on track and where they deviated. Getting on track is easier, when you know what your options are.

Conversely, know when to stop pursuing projects that have a low probability of succeeding. Fail quickly is the mantra.

The Solar Executive MBA Training will give you a solid foundation to sift through your projects as a powerful screen against your own assumptions. Guess no more. And your classmates also have stories to tell on how they overcame challenges as well.

You’ll learn a new way of looking at your solar ambitions.

Class starts on Monday.

See you there.

Keith Cronin

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