If you talk to enough commercial and industrial property owners, you start hearing the same sentence over and over again: “We looked at solar before.”Sometimes it’s followed by a feasibility study. Sometimes a half-finished spreadsheet. Sometimes a developer who stopped responding. Almost never is it followed by a built project.
Despite favorable economics, record incentives, and growing pressure to decarbonize, only a small fraction of viable onsite energy projects ever make it to execution. The reason is surprisingly consistent and widely misunderstood.
🔍 The problem isn’t technology or capital
There’s no shortage of clean energy technology available to commercial buyers. Solar, storage, and other distributed energy resources are mature, well-understood, and increasingly cost-competitive.
Capital isn’t the blocker either. Tax equity, infrastructure funds, and private capital are actively looking for deployable projects. Incentives are meaningful, well-documented, and—in many cases—time-bound. Yet projects still stall. That’s because the hardest part of onsite decarbonization isn’t engineering or financing. It’s origination.
🧱 Where projects actually break down
Origination is everything that happens between “this might work” and “this is getting built.” It’s also where most projects quietly die.
Feasibility without momentum
Many projects never move beyond a high-level feasibility study. The analysis exists, but there’s no clear next step, no standardized scope, and no internal owner responsible for moving it forward.
Fragmented vendor outreach
Buyers are often left to contact developers one by one, each proposing a different structure, price, and timeline. Comparing options becomes difficult, slow, and politically risky.
Internal alignment friction
Onsite energy decisions usually involve sustainability teams, asset managers, procurement, finance, and operations. Without a clear process, alignment becomes a bottleneck—and momentum fades.
Execution uncertainty
Even when economics look good, buyers worry about interconnection delays, contract complexity, and whether the project will actually get delivered as promised.
Individually, none of these issues seem fatal. Together, they create enough friction to stall most projects indefinitely.
🧠 The “we looked at it before” trap
From the buyer’s perspective, stalled projects don’t feel like failures. They feel like responsible caution. But over time, these half-starts add up:
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Internal confidence erodes
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Stakeholders disengage
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Energy projects get deprioritized
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The same analysis gets repeated year after year
The result is a portfolio full of potential and very little execution.
🚦 Origination is the real bottleneck
If capital, incentives, and technology were the limiting factors, we’d see far more projects moving forward. Instead, what’s missing is a repeatable way to:
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Evaluate portfolios consistently
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Create clear, comparable scopes
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Run transparent procurement processes
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Reduce internal decision burden
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Move from analysis to contracts quickly
Origination isn’t a side task. It’s the core challenge of onsite decarbonization at scale.
🔁 What changes when origination works
When origination is done well, everything downstream improves:
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Developers engage more seriously
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Pricing becomes clearer and more competitive
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Internal stakeholders align faster
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Execution risk is surfaced earlier
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Projects actually get built
Most importantly, buyers stop “looking at” energy projects—and start delivering them.
👉 What this means for portfolio owners
If you’re responsible for decarbonizing a portfolio, the question isn’t whether projects pencil on paper. It’s whether your process can turn viable opportunities into signed contracts—reliably and repeatedly. That’s the difference between 5% getting built and something far more meaningful.
If you’re ready to move beyond one-off feasibility studies and stalled pilots, learn how a portfolio-first origination process can help turn viable projects into real outcomes.
