The financing landscape for solar and storage is navigating one of its most consequential inflection points in years. Moderated by Adam Miller, chief revenue officer at Solarity, the afternoon session panel, New Paths, New Pressures: Financing Solar and Storage in a Post-ITC Era, featured Richard Dovere, CEO of Dispatch Energy; Joe Ritter, chief development officer at Seminole Financial Services; Pooja Shah, practice lead for tax credit technical due diligence at DNV; and Alex Shoer, managing partner at GridVest.
Miller opened with a primer on the current ITC landscape. He covered safe harbor mechanics, FEOC compliance thresholds, and the implications of recent Treasury guidance before opening the floor to the panel.
Three Buckets and a Lot of Uncertainty
Shoer broke it down: developers navigating FEOC requirements are sorting themselves into three groups: those who safe-harbored last year and are moving forward with Chinese-manufactured equipment; those developing projects without tax credits entirely; and those waiting for FEOC-compliant options to become available. That third bucket, he said, is where the market is getting stuck. “A lot of manufacturers I’ve met with even this week haven’t given a clear answer as to when they’re actually going to have a FEOC-compliant battery solution.”
His recommendation: try to make the project pencil without tax credits. Most developers don’t want to hear that, he acknowledged, but waiting carries its own risks – UL certifications, fire testing, and deployments all take time. The bright spot in recent Treasury guidance: a wider scope of what counts toward the non-FEOC percentage, including transformers and other balance-of-system components. “By 2028,” he said, “I think we’ll be back into a very strong storage market.”
In the meantime, roughly half his clients are moving forward simply because they need to. “They need power and it’s going to save them money no matter what their battery costs.”
The Ambiguity Is the Point
When an audience member asked the panel why the recent FEOC guidance felt insufficient, Dovere offered the most pointed response. “I don’t necessarily agree that it was insufficient,” he said. “The ambiguity is the point. The lack of clarity is, in fact, the policy point.” The guidance, he noted, had been sent to the White House weeks earlier and rejected – not, he implied, in order to make it more favorable to the industry. By keeping compliance requirements unclear, the administration effectively limits what capital markets can do unless they take an “uber-compliant” approach.
Miller offered a counterpoint: the IRS is also simply underfunded, which may explain some of the gaps. Shoer added that ownership auditing has become a critical and underappreciated piece of FEOC compliance – and that firms like DNV are likely to get very busy sorting it out. One detail Dovere made sure the room noted: the FEOC compliance period is no longer three years – it’s six.
The Warranty Debate
The session’s liveliest exchange centered on how much warranties are worth and whether new entrants can be trusted to back them up.
Ritter was direct: tier-one manufacturers generally back up their warranties. “For manufacturers who have invested heavily in the US, they can’t afford the reputational damage,” he said. “But it’s also about the relationship – if you’re a good customer, they want to work with you. If you’re not, they’ll find every reason not to.” But he distinguished clearly between the handful he’d trust and the much larger pool where a warranty is, in his words, “just a piece of paper.”
Shoer pushed on cost – a 20-year LTSA can run as much as the battery itself, and he argued the industry needs to get creative about alternatives, including third-party operators and shorter-term agreements. He pointed to markets like Europe and Australia, where comparable systems are being deployed at costs 50% lower. “No wonder we’re not moving as fast as we could or should.”
Shah noted that the conversation around innovation extends well beyond compliance. At the conference alone, she said, she had heard sessions touching on alternative chemistries, domestic content strategies, and long-duration storage – and even early-stage conversations around recycling technologies. “There are so many different types of conversations happening,” she said. “And there are so many great ideas out there.”
Headwinds, Tailwinds, and What Comes Next
The panel turned to the broader landscape. Shah framed it this way:: the tailwinds – rising energy demand, affordability pressure – are well understood. The harder question is navigating the headwinds: policy uncertainty, supply chain constraints, and a compliance landscape that’s still taking shape.
On new battery technologies, the panel was consistent: willing to look, but not willing to leap. Ritter cited bandwidth constraints – finite capital and human resources make it hard to pull analysts off proven deal flow to evaluate nascent technologies. Shoer said GridVest needs to see more than ten deployments before getting comfortable, and even then, the warranty question looms. Dovere noted that Dispatch had recently deployed a four-megawatt fuel cell project in Connecticut – an old technology finding new relevance – and that he’s open to technologies with an established track record, even if not mainstream.
Miller closed with two thoughts. First, demand for resilience isn’t slowing: climate-driven outages are creating durable markets for storage, including in underserved communities and tribal nations where standalone power systems are the only viable solution. Second: “Solar and storage isn’t dying. It’s just going on a little bit of a diet.”