How to Use Conductor
Conductor Solar is a marketplace where developers and EPCs find the best financiers for their C&I and community solar projects. We match projects and portfolios with investors by deal size, geography, customer type, and other factors to make everyone’s efforts focused on deals with the highest likelihood to close.
To do this, we collect project information from developers and EPCs and review every project before it gets matched with investors. We make sure the project economics work and the production estimate is reasonable. And we screen for common data errors and areas of misunderstanding. Our team has helped finance hundreds of C&I and community solar projects. We’re focused on saving time and money for everyone in this market.
As a developer or EPC, you can follow these steps to finance your project on Conductor:
1. Enter project details
Create a new project from your dashboard and fill in the required data fields. Documents are optional, but they can help - particularly with more unusual or complicated projects.
The required fields include the data points that investors will need to price a project. They’re organized by the main categories that drive economics including the project’s budget, revenue, and expenses. Conveniently, these are also the same data points that you can use to estimate pricing yourself.
2. Get automated price estimates
Once the required data fields are completed, “Generate Price Estimate” on the project summary page will give you a range for where the winning bid from an investor is likely to be. We find these ranges to contain the winning bid about 90% of the time for PPAs and leases, whether you’re looking for investors to bid on the project value (EPC cost + development fee) or the offtake rate (e.g. initial PPA rate per kWh).
3. Submit your project
When you’re ready to connect with investors for bids, submit your project for review. Our team will take a look and follow up with any questions within a day or two.
4. Connect with investors
We’ll connect you with up to five investors that fit your project and your objectives. Once matches are made in the marketplace, both sides can reach out and discuss the project in more detail. This is a chance to get to know who you’d be working with and clarify any outstanding questions that might impact pricing.
5. Compare your bids
Conductor sets the bid deadlines for investors, and they do a pretty fantastic job at providing bids within those deadlines for most projects. The ones that take longer have unique features that require more investigation like advanced microgrids, technologies beyond solar and battery storage, and new types of community solar revenue streams. All bids are based on the information provided by developers and EPCs, which Conductor organizes in a consistent way.
Comparing your bids involves more than just reviewing the numbers. Other factors to consider include the extent of the diligence process, vendor requirements, contractual restrictions, and the financier’s experience with particular project types. Our team will help surface these considerations so that you can make an informed decision.
6. Select a partner
Choosing an investor for a project is as simple as clicking “Accept Bid” in the app. This will tell us that you’ve chosen the group that you want to work with, and we’ll bring into further workflow tools to help everyone manage the data room for the diligence process. The more the documents area is already populated, the faster closing can be.
Interested in learning more? Check out our most popular articles on C&I solar finance:
