How Developers, Financiers, and Energy Buyers are Rethinking Project StrategyÂ
For two decades, the investment tax credit has shaped how solar and storage gets financed, developed, and deployed. As safe harbor windows close and federal incentives phase down, the industry is facing something it hasn’t dealt with before: a real market reset.
At Intersolar & Energy Storage North America (IESNA) Midwest, the workshop session, The Post-ITC Playbook: Structuring Viable Projects After 2027, brought together developers, financiers, EPCs, manufacturers, and energy buyers for a two-hour working session to pressure-test assumptions and build frameworks for what comes next.
Evelyn Carpenter, President and CEO of Invera Energy, facilitated alongside Ravi Mikkelsen, CEO of Atmos Financial, PBC; Genevieve Kennedy, Central Market Lead at Madison Energy Infrastructure; and Geoffrey Hebertson, Lead Renewables Analyst at Rystad Energy.
After a market overview from Hebertson, attendees broke into three groups covering the residential, commercial and industrial (C&I), and utility scale sectors, then came back together to share what each table had worked through.
The Demand Backdrop
Hebertson framed the workshop around a single driving force: power demand is climbing fast, and data centers are leading the charge.
Rystad Energy projects that by 2030, data centers will account for roughly 12 percent of total U.S. power demand, growing to about a quarter of all demand by 2050. Residential and commercial load growth is happening too, but incrementally, tied to population trends and household electrification. The big numbers are coming from computing; where that computing lands is shifting.
PJM has historically been the first call for hyperscalers, given its proximity to federal infrastructure and fiber networks, but it’s getting congested. MISO and ERCOT are now among the fastest-growing power markets in the country by compound annual growth rate, with lower land and electricity costs drawing data center investment into the Midwest and Texas.
Hebertson walked through how all that new demand might get powered. Solar and wind paired with storage are the most affordable and fastest to deploy, though dispatchability remains a legitimate question. Gas turbines are reliable and dispatchable, but original equipment manufacturer (OEM) order books are running long, and manufacturers are deliberately holding back on new capacity. They got burned in the early 2000s building out fast, and they’re not in a hurry to repeat it.
The practical upshot: every electron counts, and solar and storage are still the clearest path to getting new generation online quickly.
Breakout Findings
Residential: Rebuilding Trust Through Transparency
The residential group started with the numbers and quickly got to something harder. With the 25D credit phased down, cash purchases now account for nearly all transactions.
Lease and power purchase agreement (PPA) products are carrying up to $1.40 per watt in additional bill-of-materials cost for Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC)-compliant and domestic content equipment, and process overhead adds another 20 to 60 cents per watt on top of that. The economics are tighter than they’ve been in a long time.
But the group kept coming back to a problem that predates any of those cost pressures: trust. Years of opaque proposals, aggressive sales tactics, and high-profile company failures have left homeowners skeptical. The proposal tools that became standard over the past decade were designed to minimize choices, not clarify them.
The group’s recommendation was to go the other way: show customers what cash looks like, what a loan looks like, what a lease looks like, and let them decide. That kind of consultative approach used to be the norm, and the industry has drifted away from it. Getting residential solar back on track, the group agreed, starts with getting straight with customers.
C&I: State Policy Is Doing the Heavy Lifting
The C&I group focused mostly on front-of-meter development, though one of the facilitators flagged something worth noting: behind-the-meter activity was barely represented at the tables. That’s surprising given that in New York, at peak solar generation in June, 90 percent of output is behind the meter. There’s an opportunity the industry may be underworking.
Illinois kept coming up as the example that’s making real progress. Its incentive structure gives developers and financiers what they need most right now: clarity and predictability. The group’s instinct was to treat it as a model and push for similar frameworks in other Midwest states. This is a Midwest conference, as one participant noted, and the appetite to replicate what’s working here is real.
On the financing side, the conversation was pretty direct. Early-stage speculative development is not the growth engine it used to be. Capital is moving toward projects that are well-identified, have a clear path to offtake, and come with long-term contracts that limit exposure. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for creative partnership between early-stage developers and long-term asset owners, but the terms of those partnerships have changed.
Good interconnection choices and disciplined project siting aren’t new advice, but they’re more consequential now.
Utility Scale and Transmission: Data Centers, the Grid, and Policy Headwinds
The utility scale group covered the most ground, moving through data center siting, transmission constraints, tariff pressure, and the current federal policy environment.
On data centers, participants pointed to DTE Energy’s approach in Michigan as something worth watching. Rather than fielding requests reactively, DTE is steering data centers toward specific parts of its grid where infrastructure already exists to support them. It’s not a perfect solution; land prices can run up, and concentration carries its own risks. But it can meaningfully cut the time from announcement to power-on, and it gives developers a clearer picture of where to focus.
Community friction around data centers came up more than once. There’s real public anxiety about what large computing facilities mean for local electricity rates, jobs, and the environment. The group talked about the need for a clearer social contract between the data center industry and the places it moves into, one that leads with public benefit rather than treating it as an afterthought.
On policy, participants were candid. Federal permitting slowdowns are quietly functioning as a ceiling on large wind and solar projects right now, whatever the stated rationale. Some people in the room said they’re sitting on projects or originating new ones knowing the regulatory picture could look very different by the time those projects are operational.Â
Distributed generation-scale solar, with its longer useful life, was seen as better positioned to weather that kind of uncertainty than larger utility-scale work.
What the Room Agreed On
The three groups were working through different problems, but a few things came up across all of them.
State policy is carrying most of the load right now, and Illinois is the clearest proof point. The desire to see that model spread to neighboring states was genuine.
Financiers need predictability more than they need incentive size; the deals that are getting done are the ones where risk is legible and offtake is locked in. And nobody in the room thought the long-term picture for solar and storage was fundamentally broken. Demand is real, affordability pressure is real, and the resilience argument only gets stronger as the grid faces more stress.
Carpenter closed by framing the session for what it was: not a place to land on final answers, but a place to have the conversations the industry needs to be having at the project level, the deal level, and the policy level. By that measure, the room did what it came to do.
