You signed the contract. You picked a partner. You kicked off your onsite decarbonization program, and now you're three months in, staring at a pipeline of sites in various stages of evaluation, wondering: is this going well?
It's a fair question. Onsite energy projects have long timelines, and the gap between "getting started" and "panels on a roof" can feel uncomfortably quiet. If you're used to capital projects with clear construction milestones, the early months of origination can feel like nothing is happening. That silence makes people nervous, and nervous stakeholders start asking whether the whole effort was worth it.
But origination isn't construction. The milestones are different. The leading indicators are different. And if you know what to look for, you can tell whether your program is building momentum or drifting, well before anyone breaks ground.
Month 3: You should have clarity, not contracts
Three months in, the right question isn't "how many projects are under contract?" It's "do we know which sites are real and which ones aren't?"
A healthy program at the 90-day mark has completed feasibility screening across your portfolio and produced a ranked shortlist of sites. You should know which buildings have the roof condition, electrical infrastructure, and utility rate structures that make onsite generation viable. Just as importantly, you should know which ones don't, and why.
This is the stage where the portfolio framing matters most. Teams that evaluate one site at a time spend months on a single feasibility study, only to discover a fatal flaw (a roof replacement scheduled for next year, an interconnection constraint, a lease that expires in four years) that could have been flagged in the first week. Teams that screen the full portfolio upfront can redirect effort to sites with the highest probability of execution.
By month 3, you should also have a shared decision framework. Your team, your providers, and your internal stakeholders should agree on what "viable" means: minimum system size, target IRR, acceptable contract structures, deal-breakers. If you're still debating whether PPAs or leases are on the table at the 90-day mark, you've lost time.
What healthy looks like at 3 months: 70-80% of your portfolio has been screened. You have a shortlist of 5-15 priority sites. Your internal team can explain, without caveats, why those sites are at the top. You've eliminated the obvious non-starters.
What should worry you: your partner is still "gathering data" on most sites, you haven't seen a ranked list, or every site is described as "promising" with no clear prioritization.
Month 6: You should have competitive proposals, not just feasibility studies
By the six-month mark, your top sites should be moving through competitive procurement. That means you've issued RFPs (or structured solicitations) to qualified providers and received binding proposals with real pricing.
This is where the bandwidth problem shows up most clearly. Running a competitive process for even one site takes real effort: structuring the RFP, qualifying bidders, normalizing proposals across different contract structures, negotiating terms. Doing it across five or ten sites simultaneously requires either a very large team or a very efficient process.
The difference between programs that are on track and programs that are stalling is usually visible in the numbers. A program that's working will have 3-5 sites with competitive proposals in hand and 1-2 sites entering contract negotiation. A program that's struggling will have lots of feasibility studies but no competitive tension, because the team couldn't get from screening to procurement at any reasonable pace.
Six months is also when you should see your first real interconnection applications submitted. NREL data shows that the median timeline from interconnection application to permission to operate is 53 business days, but in high-demand states like California, Texas, and New York, utility reviews can stretch to six months or longer. Starting early matters. If your first interconnection application hasn't been filed by month 6, your 12-month timeline is already compressed.
What healthy looks like at 6 months: competitive proposals received on 3-5 sites, 1-2 contracts in negotiation, interconnection applications submitted for lead sites, and a clear view of which sites are moving to execution and which have been deprioritized.
What should worry you: you have feasibility reports but no RFPs issued, your provider list hasn't been vetted competitively, or interconnection timelines haven't been addressed.
Month 12: You should have projects in execution and a repeatable pipeline
A year in, the question shifts from "is this working?" to "is this scalable?" The answer depends on two things: whether your first projects are actually moving toward construction, and whether the process that got them there can be repeated without starting from scratch.
On the execution side, your lead projects (2-4 sites, depending on portfolio size) should have signed contracts and be progressing through permitting, interconnection approval, and engineering. Some may be in construction. Others will be waiting on utility timelines, which in the current market can add 2-6 months depending on jurisdiction. That's normal. The SEIA Q4 2025 market report noted that the commercial solar segment grew 6% in 2025 despite persistent interconnection and labor constraints. Timelines are longer than anyone wants, but projects are getting built.
On the process side, this is where you find out whether you built a program or just ran a batch of one-off projects. A repeatable energy program means your second wave of sites can move through screening, procurement, and contracting faster than the first wave did. Your templates exist. Your decision criteria are documented. Your provider relationships are established. Your internal approval process has been tested.
The difference matters because most portfolios don't decarbonize in a single wave. If your first 3-4 projects took 12 months to reach execution, but your next 5-10 sites can reach the same stage in 6-8 months, your program is compounding. If every new site feels like starting over, you have a project, not a program.
What healthy looks like at 12 months: 2-4 projects under contract or in construction, a second wave of 5-10 sites in active procurement, cycle times visibly shorter than the first wave, and an internal team that can articulate the process without relying on a single person's institutional knowledge.
What should worry you: your first projects are still in negotiation, there's no second wave in the pipeline, or the team that ran the first wave is burned out and can't repeat it.
The leading indicators that matter most
Across all three milestones, a few signals are more predictive than others. The number of sites screened per month tells you whether your process can handle portfolio scale. The ratio of feasibility-to-RFP conversion tells you whether screening is actually leading to action, or just producing reports. Time from RFP issuance to binding proposal tells you whether your competitive process is efficient. And the number of interconnection applications in progress tells you whether you're managing the longest lead-time risk in the whole process.
None of these are the metrics that show up in board presentations. But they're the ones that tell you, months before the ribbon cutting, whether your decarbonization effort is real.
The reason only 5% of viable projects get built isn't that the economics don't work. It's that origination is hard, slow, and full of process risk that compounds when you can't see it. The fix isn't optimism. It's measurement.
If your program is producing these indicators, you're on track, even if the construction photos are still months away. The organizations that decarbonize their portfolios aren't the ones with the best feasibility studies. They're the ones that built the process to move from study to execution, repeatedly, without losing momentum along the way.
