When you develop, own, or acquire solar assets, scaling your portfolio is at the forefront of your mind. Every moving piece in your development timeline contributes to these efforts, including forecasting, construction, and your post-install solar O&M (operations and maintenance) plan.
Each stage of development brings challenges to your growth, and solar maintenance services are no exception. That’s because they’re necessary and ongoing for the lifetime of your assets, which is a minimum 25+ year investment. As such, the very nature of solar O&M can present a major portion of your scalability challenges.Here’s why that is, and how you can solve for it.
How Solar O&M Can Inhibit Scaling Efforts
Whether through acquisition or development, let’s say you have a portfolio of 100 dispersed solar assets across several regions and your plan is to multi-source service technicians in each area. With this decision, you’re going to have a plethora of headaches holding you back from scaling.
For starters, you have to deal with the reality of onboarding these new suppliers, which can be a long and arduous process, taking typically anywhere from 3-6 months. And sometimes, onboarding doesn’t line up with when your assets are ready to operate.
Your next headache is managing multiple technicians and/or providers in each region. If you want your assets to have corrective and preventative maintenance support at the ready, do you have the capacity to manage all these providers while trying to scale?
On that note, if your strategy is regional sourcing, you ultimately pigeonhole yourself into deals with partners who may not be able to scale with you once they reach their bandwidth. For example, your team of 10 technicians in a particular region can only handle so many assets, and once they’re maxed out, you won’t be able to (easily) scale your portfolio.
These solar O&M challenges are only the start of your concerns if you want to grow quickly. How do you handle them – and more – so you can scale effectively? The answer is to simplify.
Simplification = Scalability
If you can simplify your solar O&M strategy, you can scale more quickly. And the easiest way to simplify your O&M service needs is to strategically source one national provider who’s built to scale.
This way, you don’t have to deal with the headaches that come from multiple vendors across distributed assets. Instead, you can benefit from economies of scale by outsourcing to an expert solar O&M solution provider who will handle technician onboarding, deployment, and long-term relationships for you.
Omnidian is this exact partner for many developers, IPPs, and owner-operators. As an extension of your team, we function as the single point of contact for your post-install experience so you can scale more efficiently.
We’ve strategically sourced over 120 service providers – spanning 700+ technicians – across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico who are fully vetted, contracted, and ready to serve your assets today. This reach means you’ll have an on-demand network of specialist technicians to help you build a resilient asset portfolio that’s able to scale as you do.
Best of all, you now have a single source of truth for asset and portfolio-level data and analytics, as well as streamlined billing from a sole provider. You can also expect quality and consistent system inspections thanks to our carefully curated, best-in-class scope of work, informed by nearly 50 years of hands-on field experience and over 100 years of solar expertise across our company.
Strategic sourcing is critical to your scalability across solar projects because it streamlines the procurement process, reduces the amount of vendors you need to manage, and allows you to focus on development growth while we ensure asset performance. – Trish Graf, Vice President of Enterprise Sales
Solving Solar O&M for Faster Growth
Solar O&M problems don’t have to hold you back from scaling your solar projects effectively. The right partner can help mitigate roadblocks around field service provider onboarding, management, and more, leaving you with both peace of mind and the time needed to scale your portfolio to the next level.
