Questions by role
A board member, a sustainability director, and an owner-operator are evaluating the same system against three different tests. Pick the one that describes your seat at the table.
You answer to voters, an auditor, and a budget cycle.
In most cases you never write a check. Under a power purchase agreement a third party owns and maintains the system on your property and you buy the electricity it produces at a fixed rate below your current utility price. There is no bond question, no capital outlay, and no asset on your books. Where capital is available — bond proceeds, a lease-purchase, or grant money that must be spent this fiscal year — direct ownership or a prepaid lease usually costs less over twenty years. We model all of them side by side before you choose.
Because we will not propose it if it is not. The test is simple: the annual payment has to be smaller than the annual avoided cost, in year one, using your actual interval data and your actual rate schedule. If a project cannot clear that bar we say so. A structure that requires you to find new money every year is a structure that gets cancelled at the first budget shortfall.
Through the process you already use. We respond to competitive RFPs and RFQs, we are prequalified where required, and we can be reached through cooperative purchasing vehicles where your policy allows. We can also help your team write a scope of work that is technically neutral, so the solicitation stands up if a losing bidder challenges it.
We schedule around you, not the other way around. Roof work typically runs in summer, over breaks, or on weekends; carport work is phased so parking stays available. Every contractor on site is badged and background-checked to district requirements, and staging areas stay outside student circulation.
That is the question most boards forget to ask, and it is the one that decides whether this was a good investment. Systems fail quietly — a string drops offline and nobody notices until the savings stop. Our O and M agreements include monitoring against the production model, scheduled inspection, and repair, and we service arrays other companies installed. Ask any bidder what happens if their company is no longer in business. Ask us the same thing.
That the district is spending less on electricity and more on students, and that you can prove it. Public buildings make this visible in a way private ones do not — production data can be published, displayed in a lobby, or used in a classroom. Several of our institutional clients use their systems as teaching tools.
You need a number for finance and a number for the report.
On-site generation reduces purchased electricity, which lowers your Scope 2 emissions directly rather than through an offset purchase. That distinction matters to reviewers and increasingly to customers, because it is a real reduction at the point of consumption, not a certificate bought elsewhere. We provide the production data your reporting team needs, metered and verifiable.
Ask this question of every bidder, early. If you own the system outright, you own the RECs and can retire them against your own claims. Under most power purchase agreements the third-party owner keeps them, which means you are buying cheaper electricity but you may not be able to claim the emissions reduction. Those are two different products. We will make the REC treatment explicit in writing before you sign anything, because a sustainability report built on RECs you do not own is a real exposure.
The same project supports both cases and it should be presented that way. On-site generation converts a variable operating expense into a fixed, known cost for twenty-five years — that is a hedge, and finance understands hedges. Add the investment tax credit, accelerated depreciation, and demand charge reduction, and most commercial projects in this market return in the high single digits to low teens unlevered. We build the model with your tax position and your rate schedule; your CPA validates it.
Yes. A power purchase agreement keeps the asset and the obligation with the third-party owner and shows up as an operating expense. That is often the deciding factor for companies with debt covenants or capital allocation constraints. It usually costs more over the full term than ownership — the trade is real and we will quantify it rather than gloss it.
That is the more valuable version of this project. One equipment standard, one monitoring platform, one service agreement, and one reporting format across every site makes the portfolio manageable and makes year-over-year comparison meaningful. We start with a portfolio-wide analysis that ranks your sites by opportunity, so capital goes to the buildings where it does the most, in the order that makes sense.
Carefully, and early. Split incentive — the landlord pays for the system while the tenant pays the utility bill — kills more commercial projects than economics do. There are workable structures: a landlord-owned system with a rent adjustment, a tenant-owned system with a lease extension, or a PPA that either party can host. The conversation has to happen before design, not after.
It is your money, your building, and your operation.
That is the only question that matters and it depends entirely on how it is financed. A five-year loan on a twenty-five year asset will cost you money every month for five years. A longer-term structure — a PACE assessment on the Texas side, or an extended-term lender — usually produces a payment smaller than the savings from month one. Same equipment, same savings, completely different experience. We show you both.
No. If you own commercial property in a Texas jurisdiction with a PACE program, including El Paso County, the assessment can finance up to the full project cost with nothing down, repaid through the property over twenty years or more. If you sell the building, the balance transfers with it. That last point removes the objection we hear most: I might not be here in twenty years.
You already know. The question is what it costs — spoiled product, idled staff still on the clock, customers turned away, a POS system down on a Friday. Put an hour figure on it and the storage conversation stops being philosophical. Solar alone does not keep you running during an outage; a battery does, sized to the loads you actually need — refrigeration, point of sale, lighting, a server, maybe one line.
Usually not at all. Most of the work happens outside the building or on the roof. The interconnection tie-in requires a short planned outage, typically a few hours, and we schedule it when you are closed. We will tell you the window in advance and we will hold to it.
Modules and inverters carry manufacturer warranties that run to the equipment maker, not to us — which means they survive even if an installer goes out of business. What does not survive is having someone who will diagnose the problem, file the claim, and do the labor. That is what a service agreement is for, and it is why we still service systems installed by companies that no longer exist.
Sometimes the honest answer is no — a roof with a few years left, heavy shading, or the wrong structure. In that case the options are a carport, a ground mount if you have land, or waiting until you reroof. We would rather tell you that now than sell you a system that has to come off in four years.
Every one of these roles ends up at the same place: the project has to be financially responsible, and ideally budget neutral or better from the first year. That outcome is decided by the financing structure more than by the equipment. See the financing options.
