The C&I solar and storage market is having its moment – but getting there requires navigating supply chain uncertainty, execution pitfalls, and a financing landscape in transition.
Moderated by Ryan Kennedy, senior editor at pv magazine, the session, Navigating C&I Solar and Storage from Concept to Commissioning, featured Spencer Wells, CEO of Wells Energy Development; Claire Broido Johnson, president of Sunrock Distributed Generation; John McDonnell, CEO of WattHub Renewables; and Stein Arntson, enterprise account manager at Aurora Solar/HelioScope.
Each panelist presented briefly before opening to Q&A, drawing on real project experience to give the room practical guidance for what Johnson called the “messy middle” of C&I development.
Storage Is Coming — But It’s Still the Wild West
The panel was unified on one point: storage is about to have its moment in C&I. The question is how to get there from here. Johnson was direct. “Battery storage in 2026 feels very much like solar in 2005,” she said. It’s not yet a commoditized product, the approved vendor list for most capital partners is short, and the risks – technology, fire, supply chain – are driving higher IRR requirements. “That’s not going to last forever,” she added. “But a lot of these battery storage companies in the exhibit hall will not be around for it.”
Wells described a bifurcated supply chain: on the solar PV side, there’s at least direction on module and inverter manufacturers meeting FEOC and domestic content requirements. Storage is a different story. “It’s still the Wild West,” he said – FEOC-compliant cells are hard to source, lead times for domestic content batteries are running 12 to 18 months, and not many vendors in the C&I market have completed the large-scale fire testing and UL certifications that investors require.
Arntson added data context: even with the ITC phasing out, WoodMac projects the C&I segment growing 3% annually through 2030, driven by rising utility rates. “That doesn’t mean 2026 is going to be easy,” he said. “This is the year we’re figuring it all out.” His read: the challenge is less structural collapse than margin compression – which puts a premium on being judicious about where you spend money early in the development cycle.
Execution Is Where Deals Die
McDonnell walked through the construction pitfalls that catch C&I developers off guard, especially when expanding from residential. Accurate designs matter from the start. Residential designers can’t be handed commercial projects, particularly in California, where ADA requirements and capital improvement laws create additional exposure. Install manuals need to be followed precisely – on one project, an engineer specified quarter-inch bolts on a raised roof installation, the wrong size, and replacing them cost the team time and money. “Your crew has to know the install manuals, from racking and mounting to modules,” McDonnell said.
Unforeseen site conditions are a constant. “We can do radar, we can do all the private locating you want,” McDonnell said. “On the last project Claire and I did together, we hit a buried car.” The lesson: thorough site diligence is non-negotiable – and the QA/QC burden doesn’t rest solely with the EPC. Developers need to verify that their EPC has a process, and financiers should triple-check.
Johnson added a case study of her own: a storage project in California that sailed through to substantial completion before the county informed the team that the fire code required $500,000 in additional work. “We had to trust our partners,” she said. The team shared the cost, negotiated a PPA rate increase with the offtaker, and made it work, but the experience underscored how quickly unforeseen costs can reshape project economics.
Financing Without the ITC
Solar is already cost-effective without the ITC in a growing number of states, Johnson said, driven by falling panel prices and rising utility rates. The industry is shifting toward energy service agreements – solar-plus-storage or storage-only structures – and the direction of travel is clear. “In 10 to 15 years, it won’t be solar as the main thing with batteries on the side,” she said. “It’ll be batteries as the main thing with solar on the side.”
For now, the focus is on states with high and rising utility rates – California, Massachusetts, the Northeast tier-one markets – where the economics work with or without federal incentives. FEOC compliance and supplier attestations remain the wild card: tax equity has no interest in taking on that risk, pushing it to OEMs and, ultimately, developers.
McDonnell was bullish on the post-ITC era for a different reason: eliminating tax equity structures also eliminates much of the soft cost burden – the attorneys, insurers, and accountants that can add six or seven figures to a project’s cost. “I don’t think it’ll take a whole lot for deals to pencil in a post-ITC era,” he said.
Interconnection: Still the Chokepoint
Wells called interconnection “the holy grail”: the foundational piece that everything else in the development process is built around. Johnson added, “The interconnection queue is completely unsustainable. Utilities are using it as a crutch.” With 63 gigawatts currently queued in PJM alone, and some jurisdictions taking two years to process even small projects, she predicted brownouts and blackouts in the near term – and a forced reckoning for utilities.
The practical mitigation strategies: reduce export to the grid wherever possible to avoid lengthy distribution and substation studies, use ICA maps for upfront diligence to set realistic timelines, and build interconnection realities into customer and investor expectations from day one. “It’s tribal knowledge,” Wells said. “You have to know the right person at the utility.”
The Bottom Line
When asked about leaning into the storage moment amid tariffs, FEOC uncertainty, and domestic supply chain constraints, the panel’s advice was consistent: don’t wait, but plan carefully. Supply chain confidence will improve by Q3 or Q4 as FEOC rules clarify and new vendors enter the approved list. Developers who sign projects now have months of engineering and permitting ahead of them to sort out procurement.
“There are a lot of brilliant people in this industry,” Johnson said. “Let EPCs do what EPCs do, developers do what developers do, financiers do what they do – and we put the plan in place together.”