About a year after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) reshaped the solar and storage financing landscape, the Financing the Energy Transition: Closing Deals in a Post-OBBBA Market session at the Intersolar & Energy Storage North America (IESNA) Midwest conference brought together lenders, tax equity advisors, developers, and aggregators to take stock of what has actually changed.
The panel featured Samuel Egendorf, Partner & CLO at Range Renewables; Aviv Shalgi, CEO of Solar Simplified; Michelle Lipchin, VP of Growth at Sunstone Credit; Maroua Jabouri, Business Development Manager at TotalEnergies; and Jacob Carney, Managing Director of 38 Degrees North.
The room skewed heavily toward developers and Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPCs), and the conversation reflected that, with the panelists notably candid about how much uncertainty still surrounds the market.
What Is Materially Harder to Close
Egendorf opened with the issue at the top of every deal right now: the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) cliff. The push to close safe harbor projects is relentless, and his pipeline has rarely been busier. But the more structural surprise has been on the tax equity side.
Some of the biggest investors in the market, JP Morgan and Bank of America among them, are not certain they are Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC)-compliant, which may prevent them from financing projects that started construction after January 1, 2026. Guidance is still pending, and until it arrives, some of the deepest pools of capital in the market are effectively sidelined.
On FEOC compliance generally, Egendorf was measured. With the right documentation and counterparties who know what they are doing, it is workable. He was less convinced the policy is achieving what it was designed to do. The stated goal was to push the market toward domestic manufacturing and away from Chinese-origin equipment. From what he is seeing in practice, that outcome is not clearly materializing.
Lipchin noted that Sunstone has not changed how it underwrites, but has invested heavily in market education, running roughly 30 webinars on FEOC compliance in recent months. The same two misconceptions keep coming up: that a 5% deposit is enough to safe harbor a project (it is not; title must transfer), and that domestic content panels are automatically FEOC-compliant (they are not; U.S.-manufactured panels from a Chinese-owned company will disqualify a project).
The Developer PerspectiveÂ
Carney described a simple filter on the acquisition side right now: is there a clear path to Notice to Proceed (NTP) by end of 2027? That gives enough runway to reach energization before the ITC expires without a lot of stress.
His firm works mostly on 1 to 5 megawatt AC ground-mount projects, and for that segment, a 2027 NTP target feels manageable. Projects just entering interconnection study or starting permitting are a harder call. The closer the market gets to the end of 2029, the less justification there is to keep spending on a project without high conviction it will make it.
On EPC pricing, the expected post-OBBBA correction has not materialized. The theory was that removing ITC requirements and prevailing wage mandates would bring construction costs down. So far, pricing has stayed roughly flat for about a year.
Carney thinks a real structural decline still belongs to a future phase of the market, one the industry has not entered yet, largely because every project currently in flight is still ITC-financed.
The Aggregator View
Shalgi noted that the ITC sunset will also take Category 4 adders with it, which he viewed as a net positive. Those adders have been inconsistently applied and poorly understood across the market, and sunsetting them levels the playing field.
On geography, capital is moving toward states with strong incentive stacks. Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland are attracting deal flow; markets where rates are low and incentives have thinned out are losing it. Illinois specifically offers seven community solar programs with different structures and incentives, which gives developers real flexibility that most states do not have.
Shalgi noted that some developers who cannot safe harbor are already migrating to those higher-rate, higher-incentive markets, and that trend is likely to continue.
Safe Harbor Documentation
The stakes on safe harbor documentation have never been higher. Past cycles cost you a step-down or prevailing wage. A mistake now costs the entire ITC.
Egendorf outlined the essentials: a complete, vetted package; strict attention to anti-trafficking rules, which prevent moving safe harbor equipment without also transferring project rights; and thorough documentation of physical work of a significant nature for projects using that test.
He also addressed the D.C. Circuit ruling that vacated Notice 2025-42 and technically reopened the 5% test for larger projects. His advice was practical: do not rely on it. With a Treasury appeal likely and no certainty around retroactivity if the ruling is eventually overturned, the uncertainty is too expensive when an entire project’s ITC is what you are risking.
For projects that have already been spending under the 5% test over the past 12 months, having that documentation in addition to a strong physical work showing will make financing cleaner, but he would not recommend stockpiling modules on the basis of the ruling alone.
Storage Financing
Storage brought its own complications. Battery warranties typically run 10 years against 20 for solar, which creates real structuring problems for long-term loans.
Lipchin noted that many smaller installers are still learning to model storage value correctly for commercial customers, and that storage monitoring software is considerably newer and less proven than what exists on the solar side.
Egendorf flagged warranty counterparty risk directly: at least one major battery manufacturer has already gone bankrupt, leaving warranty holders with no recourse.Â
Some states let developers capture a rate uplift on top of a time-shift. That distinction is not always obvious going in, and it makes a real difference in whether a storage project actually pencils in a given market.
What It Means for the Industry
Well-structured projects are still getting financed. The developers doing well are the ones who know their state’s incentive programs in detail, have clean safe harbor documentation, and are modeling on realistic economics rather than stacking adders and hoping the numbers work.
Rising electricity rates are strengthening project fundamentals independent of the ITC, and that is not going away anytime soon. For those who have been relying on the subsidy to make numbers work that otherwise would not, the cliff ahead will be harder than it needs to be.
