If you manage a commercial or industrial portfolio and you're evaluating an onsite solar, storage, or EV charging project, you've probably heard that competitive bidding saves money. It does. But price is the least interesting thing a well-run RFP delivers.
Done right, a competitive procurement process clarifies your project scope, forces honest risk allocation, surfaces provider quality differences you'd never see in a single-vendor negotiation, and dramatically increases the odds that the project actually gets built—on time, on budget, and without surprises eighteen months in. Here's what's actually happening when you put a project out to competitive bid.
When you invite multiple developers or EPCs to respond to the same brief, something useful happens before a single bid comes back: you're forced to define what you actually want.
A vague project description produces vague proposals. Providers will make different assumptions about system size, technology, contract structure, and performance guarantees. You end up comparing apples to oranges, and the cheapest number on the page is usually the one making the most favorable assumptions.
A structured RFP—one that specifies the site constraints, the target use case, the utility interconnection context, the preferred contract type, and the risk terms you're not willing to accept—produces proposals that can actually be compared. That discipline benefits you as the buyer before you've even received a single response.
In practice, this means that the RFP process often forces internal clarity that didn't exist before. What tariff are you on? Do you want to own the system or sign a PPA? What happens if production underperforms? These are questions you need to answer regardless of who builds the project. Competition just accelerates the moment of reckoning.
Every energy project proposal contains assumptions about who bears what risk. Performance risk. Permitting risk. Interconnection delays. Technology obsolescence. The difference between a strong provider and a weak one often isn't the system design—it's how honestly they represent these risks and how fairly the contract allocates them.
In a single-vendor negotiation, you have limited leverage and limited information. The provider knows what's market-standard; you probably don't. In a competitive process, divergence across bids becomes your signal.
If five providers propose performance guarantees and one doesn't, that's a flag. If most proposals include a specific interconnection contingency clause and one buries liability in general force majeure language, that's worth understanding. If production estimates vary by 15% across identical system sizes on the same site, someone is making aggressive assumptions—and you should know who.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Tracking the Sun dataset and related research consistently show that project performance outcomes vary significantly across installers and project types, with system design and contract structure as key differentiating factors. You won't surface those differences without side-by-side comparison.
The hardest part of competitive procurement isn't issuing the RFP. It's normalizing the responses so you can actually compare them.
Providers quote different financing structures, different degradation curves, different O&M inclusions, different escalator rates. A 25-year PPA at $0.08/kWh with a 2% escalator is not the same as one at $0.07 with a 3% escalator. A proposal that includes monitoring and inverter replacement is not the same as one that doesn't. When you don't normalize for these variables, you will almost certainly select the wrong provider—not because they're bad, but because their proposal looked better on the surface.
The fix is a standardized comparison framework: a consistent financial model that accepts variable inputs from each proposal and outputs comparable NPV, payback, and risk-adjusted return figures. This is exactly the kind of infrastructure that makes competitive procurement repeatable and scalable across a portfolio, rather than a one-off exercise that requires a consultant every time.
The Rocky Mountain Institute's Commercial Building Energy Project Toolkit and resources from ENERGY STAR's Commercial Building Partnership both emphasize standardized evaluation criteria as a prerequisite for good decision-making in energy procurement—not a nice-to-have.
The market for commercial and industrial energy projects includes providers of wildly different quality. Some have strong balance sheets, in-house engineering, and track records of on-time project delivery. Others are thin on the ground, dependent on subcontractors, and optimizing for the contract signature rather than the project outcome.
A structured competitive process acts as a quality filter in ways that informal outreach doesn't. Response quality itself is a signal. Does the provider ask smart questions during the RFP process? Is their proposal complete and responsive to your requirements, or does it reinterpret the scope in ways that favor them? Are their references reachable and do they reflect projects similar to yours?
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's guide to commercial solar procurement notes that many project failures trace back to inadequate provider vetting at the selection stage—not to technology or policy risk. Competition creates a structured environment for that vetting to happen.
Equally important: providers who know they're competing have an incentive to put their best team on the proposal and their best terms on the table. The dynamic changes. You're not being sold to; you're being pitched for.
If competitive procurement is so valuable, why do so many projects get developed through informal, single-vendor processes? A few reasons.
First, it takes work. Issuing a real RFP, managing provider communications, normalizing responses, and running a structured selection process is operationally intensive—especially if your team doesn't do it regularly.
Second, buyers often underestimate the value of what they're leaving on the table. When a trusted provider brings you a project, the cost of not knowing what else was available is invisible.
Third, the energy market has historically been fragmented and opaque. Provider relationships are local. Pricing benchmarks are hard to find. Without a clear framework or platform to manage the process, the path of least resistance is a direct negotiation.
This is changing. As onsite energy becomes a more standard component of commercial real estate strategy—driven by utility rate increases, corporate sustainability commitments, and improving project economics—the buyers who build competitive procurement into their standard workflow will consistently outperform those who don't.
A competitive RFP isn't primarily a cost-reduction tool. It's a decision-quality tool. It forces scope clarity before you need it, surfaces risk allocation differences you'd otherwise miss, enables honest provider comparison, and filters for quality at the moment when it's cheapest to do so—before you're committed.
The price savings are real. Buyers who run structured competitive processes routinely see meaningful differences in levelized cost across proposals. But that's almost secondary to the confidence and clarity you gain in knowing you selected the right project, structured the right contract, and built it with the right partner.
The projects that get built successfully aren't always the cheapest. They're the ones where the buyer understood what they were buying.
Station A runs structured competitive RFPs for commercial and industrial energy projects, normalizing provider responses into standardized comparisons that help buyers evaluate faster and transact with confidence.