Rooftop
Cheapest per watt when the roof has the life and the load capacity. Ballasted racking on TPO and EPDM, mechanically attached on standing seam. We coordinate with your roofing warranty holder so you don't void it.
Rooftop, carport and ground-mount systems from 25 kW to 3 MW for warehouses, retail, agriculture, multifamily, houses of worship and municipalities. Demand-charge analysis included, not sold separately.
A commercial utility bill is three or four different charges wearing a trench coat. Energy, demand, power factor, time-of-use. Sizing an array without reading the interval data is guessing, and guessing is how a project ends up producing beautifully while the bill barely moves.
Cheapest per watt when the roof has the life and the load capacity. Ballasted racking on TPO and EPDM, mechanically attached on standing seam. We coordinate with your roofing warranty holder so you don't void it.
Higher cost per watt, but it shades vehicles, creates covered walkways, and gives you the conduit runs for EV charging on day one. Popular with retail, hospitals and campuses.
The best economics when you own unused land. Fixed-tilt or single-axis tracking, with agrivoltaic layouts available for farms that want to keep grazing underneath.
| Sector | Typical size | What usually drives the return |
|---|---|---|
| Warehouse & logistics | 250 kW – 2 MW | Huge flat roofs, low structural loading margins. Demand charges from dock equipment and refrigeration. |
| Manufacturing | 300 kW – 3 MW | Flat load profile, high demand charges, strong case for storage-based peak shaving. |
| Agriculture | 50 kW – 1 MW | Irrigation pumping loads that align beautifully with midday sun. Ground mount usually wins. |
| Retail & restaurant | 40 – 300 kW | Afternoon-heavy HVAC load, small roofs. Carports often make the difference. |
| Multifamily | 60 – 600 kW | Master-metered common areas, or virtual net metering allocated to tenants where allowed. |
| Municipal & nonprofit | 100 kW – 1.5 MW | No tax appetite, so direct pay or a third-party PPA structure usually beats ownership. |
Longer than residential, and with more people in the room. Real timelines below, not best cases.
We request 12 months of interval data, review your rate schedule, and produce a no-cost preliminary model. About one week.
Roof core samples where needed, structural engineer's letter, switchgear inspection, and an as-built electrical review. One to three weeks.
Final design, stamped drawings, full pro forma, and side-by-side ownership structures. We present to your team and answer to your CPA.
The long pole. Commercial interconnection studies can take 8–20 weeks depending on the utility and whether you trip a system-impact study.
Two to twelve weeks on site depending on scale, scheduled around your operations. Weekly progress reporting, single point of contact.
Performance testing, utility witness test, staff training, then ongoing monitoring with an annual inspection and a production report your board can read.
A refrigerated distribution center outside Phoenix with a $41,000 monthly bill, more than half of it demand charges from compressor cycling.
Illustrative case study for this demonstration site.
From about 25 kW up to 3 MW. Below 25 kW a project usually behaves like a residential job and we treat it that way. Above 3 MW you want an EPC with a dedicated utility-scale team, and we'll happily refer you to one rather than learn on your money.
Dramatically. For many commercial accounts, 30–50% of the bill is demand, billed on your single highest 15-minute interval in the month, not energy. Solar alone shaves demand only if the peak happens to fall midday. We pull your interval data from the utility, find where your peaks actually occur, and model whether storage-backed peak shaving beats simply adding more panels.
Commercial solar is treated differently from residential. Businesses may still be able to claim the clean electricity investment credit under Section 48E and to depreciate the system under MACRS, subject to placed-in-service deadlines, domestic content and prevailing-wage rules that have changed repeatedly since 2025. We model the current rules in your proposal, and we insist you run it past your own CPA before you sign anything.
Yes. Roughly a third of our commercial work happens nights and weekends. We stage material off-hours, coordinate roof access with your property manager, and schedule the single unavoidable power interruption , usually two to four hours for the interconnection tie-in, whenever it costs you least.
Both. Carports cost more per watt than a rooftop but add covered parking, EV charging infrastructure and tenant-visible sustainability. Ground mounts are the cheapest per watt when you have unused acreage. We'll model all three configurations on your parcel before recommending one.
That depends on your lease, and it is the single most common thing that kills a good commercial project late. We review the lease term, the landlord's consent clause and the remaining term against the payback period before design starts. A power purchase agreement is often the cleaner structure for a tenant with under ten years left.
We’ll come back with a feasibility model, a demand-charge analysis and a preliminary pro forma at no cost. If the numbers don’t work on your site, we will say so in writing.
Your project is reviewed by a person, not routed to a lead marketplace.