Solar has changed. How we develop it must change too.
Ten years into solar, I saw the actual problem. Not the panels, frames or inverters. The engineering.
I was running a design consultancy. My team was doing what every team still does — redrawing layouts by hand, recalculating strings by hand, watching a system configuration change eat two or three weeks of work that should have taken a day. So we built something small to fix it for ourselves. None of us thought it would be much more than that.
Then something happened that wasn't in the plan: the fix got fast. A redesign that used to take weeks started taking a day. And our own customers noticed — asked what the tool was, asked to use it themselves. The ambition to build something bigger didn't come from a five-year plan. It came within weeks of watching that first win happen.
That's not just my story. It's the industry's.
That was the manual age. Every stage its own silo — site walked on foot, permits decided on paper, financing closed over months of back-and-forth calls. Slow, but at least you could see the whole thing.
What came next was faster, and somehow more fractured. Teams now run six, eight, twelve different tools on a single project — one for modeling, one for site data, one for everything else. Each one solving its own step and losing the next. It's not really a data problem. It's a control problem: nobody can see the whole project at once anymore.
We're done accepting that as the price of scale.
Done bending general-purpose tools around problems they were never built to solve. Done managing portfolios in the dark, unable to see which projects are real and which are quietly dying. Done watching the baton drop between engineering, finance, and GIS because nobody was working from the same file. Done letting one module change unravel three weeks of work nobody saw coming.
That's the age most of the industry is still living in. This year, we ran the largest survey of this industry we've ever done. Half of us said half or more of our projects never get built. We call 62% success normal.
The data behind this →
We don't think it's normal. We think it's what happens when nobody owns the whole thing.
There's a third age coming — not one company handing the industry a finished product, but the industry finally working from the same data, the same version of the truth, from the first site screen to the day a project goes live. It doesn't exist yet. We're building it in the open, the same way the first version got built: by watching what actually breaks, and fixing that.
A project shouldn't die from silence. It should have to be killed on purpose, in the light, by a real decision.
Let's all move from maybe to megawatts.
David Trainavicius
Co-Founder & CEO, PVcase