What’s New in the “Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room” Course

The original Solar Executive MBA launched in 2012, and it was genuinely ahead of its time. There wasn’t anything else in the industry teaching solar development that way. Now Keith Cronin is bringing that same spirit of innovation to a solar industry reshaped by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), the 2025 legislation that changed federal tax credit timelines and eligibility for wind and solar projects. That new landscape is what shaped Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room, which includes a full data room, a risk matrix for identifying where a project can fail, and years of real-world documents Keith has used with clients, not just in theory. The course also covers the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) agreement, development service agreement (DSA), membership interest purchase agreement (MIPA), operations and maintenance (O&M) agreement, power purchase agreement (PPA) or solar service agreement (SSA), a financial model, and two full case studies, so you can see how each piece fits into a real deal from origination to close. 

Learn more and enoll in the “Inside the Solar Executive MBA Data Room” course here!

When we asked Keith what’s actually new in the course compared to the original, here’s what he had to say.

What’s different about this course compared to the original?

This course is modernized for 2026. It takes into account the changes in public policy, and you get a model along with contract documents that have been vetted and that I’ve actually been using for the last three years. You’re getting real-time material, access to a data room, and all the checklists I rely on, including things I use in Google Drive that I’ll show you directly.

One piece we didn’t cover in the first course is what I’d call a risk matrix. It’s a way of identifying where a project can actually fail, and then figuring out how to resuscitate it, or fail faster if that’s the better call. Is it a go or a no-go? Once you start looking at all these potential failure points, you realize risk can show up at the host level, the real estate level, or the interconnection level. This course pulls all of that together in a way the original course only touched on.

When people ask me the same questions over and over, whether it’s an email or a call like this one, I take notes. I look at those repeated questions as an invitation to fix something in the industry and make it better. That’s always been the core of the MBA class, and it’s the core of this course too: raising the industry’s standards so everyone’s speaking the same language.

Take asset sales. People need to understand that selling an asset means having a real data room, with everything documented inside it. If someone is a subject matter expert in California but the buyer is in New York, that buyer may not know the current utility rate structure there. The reverse is just as true: a California buyer looking at a project in Rhode Island won’t necessarily understand community solar rules in Illinois or Maine. Putting all of that information in the data room, with links that let people educate themselves on unfamiliar markets, is something we never contemplated in the first course. It’s something I’ve put a lot of thought into in this one.