In early conversations with prospective customers, we hear a familiar refrain: “We know there’s probably more value here, we just don’t have the bandwidth right now.” They’ve looked at solar before. They may have even built a project. They’re not opposed to decarbonization. But nothing is moving. In practice, the biggest competitor in onsite energy isn’t another vendor. It’s doing nothing at all.
⏱️ Bandwidth, not belief, is the constraint
Most enterprise buyers don’t need to be convinced that onsite energy can work. They already believe:
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The economics can pencil
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The incentives exist
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The pressure to decarbonize is real
What they don’t have is time. Internal teams are stretched thin. Sustainability, asset management, procurement, and operations are already juggling competing priorities. Adding “run a clean energy project” to the list often feels unrealistic, even when the upside is clear. So projects wait.
🧠 Why “do nothing” keeps winning
From the inside, inaction doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like prudence. Starting a project seems to require:
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weeks of internal coordination
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vendor outreach and follow-ups
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evaluating inconsistent proposals
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explaining assumptions to leadership
Even motivated teams hesitate — not because they don’t want outcomes, but because they can’t afford another drawn-out process. Over time, “later” quietly becomes “never.”
⚙️ Time to value changes the equation
What flips this dynamic isn’t better persuasion. It’s reducing the effort required to get started — and to see results. When the time investment drops, behavior changes.
For many of our customers, the total internal time spent on a project is 4–5 hours. Everything else (portfolio evaluation, market outreach, bid comparison, and procurement support) happens outside their already-full calendars.
That shift matters. Instead of asking teams to take on another project, the process meets them where they are.
🔁 Past success doesn’t guarantee future scale
Many organizations point to a prior solar project as proof they can do this themselves. But a single success doesn’t mean the system works.
In multiple cases, customers had already completed a solar deployment — yet failed to extract value across the rest of their portfolio. Projects stalled after the first win because repeating the process felt just as hard as starting from scratch.
When the process changed, the outcomes did too:
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additional qualifying sites surfaced
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pricing improved through competition
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portfolios moved forward — not just pilots
The difference wasn’t motivation. It was leverage.
🚦 The real alternative to “do nothing”
“Do nothing” wins when moving forward feels expensive in time, attention, and political capital. It loses when:
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the effort required is small and bounded
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decisions are clear and comparable
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momentum shows up quickly
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outcomes don’t depend on heroics
At that point, inaction becomes harder to justify than action.
🧩 What this means for portfolio owners
If projects aren’t moving, it’s worth asking a different question. Not, 'Is this worth doing?', but "How much time does this actually take us?”
When time to value drops, so does resistance, and portfolios stop sitting on untapped potential. We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Organizations that completed an initial solar project struggled to extend that success across their portfolios. The first win didn’t create a repeatable system.
When those same portfolios were evaluated holistically and run through a competitive process, the results looked different: multiple new qualifying sites emerged, and project costs dropped by more than 25%, without requiring significant additional internal time.
If you know there’s more value in your portfolio but lack the bandwidth to chase it, the problem may not be ambition or economics. It may be the process.
