The small-scale ground-mount solar market is poised for massive growth, with Wood Mackenzie projecting $140 billion in demand over the next three years (2025–2027). This presents a huge wave of opportunity for developers.
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Despite these big expectations, the current U.S. permitted supply for projects ≤7MW totals only $10 billion, far below the projected demand. This significant gap highlights a core problem: finding and securing the necessary supply – experienced hardware and installation vendors – is challenging in this fragmented market.
Acting Fast Isn't Always Possible
Developers need to act fast to capitalize, but find that resources are hard to deploy in time to meet project delivery timelines. Today, developers often rely on past experiences or word-of-mouth to find the project help they need. If their usual contacts aren't available, they have to start calling friends and people in the business, which is time-consuming. Finding vendors with the right location, capabilities, and availability is a difficult task.
"Do You Know Who I Am?!"
There's also a disconnect where developers think their buying power is greater than it is, and vendors, particularly Tier One players, are less likely to prioritize smaller DG projects compared to utility-scale projects. This can lead developers to settle for second-tier vendors or face weeks or months of delay just to find who they need.
So, how can developers effectively navigate this market and access the supply needed to meet demand and deadlines?
Connect With an Expanded Network
A trusted DG marketplace offers a more streamlined, efficient, and less risky future for small-scale solar development, designed to connect developers directly with the supply they need:
- Instantly discover qualified vendors without relying on your network. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual calls and word-of-mouth searches.
- Use powerful mapping and filters (location, project size, skills, equipment types) to quickly find exactly what's needed. This allows developers to easily source locally for incentives, or find regional/national expertise.
- Gain full access to a single vendor library and see which suppliers and installers are ready today. This provides visibility into available resources when you need them.
Quick Results for Smoother Projects
The ability to find resources quickly is key to meeting completion dates and capitalizing on the opportunity.
By leveraging a platform that offers instant discovery, detailed filtering, and direct connections to available vendors, developers can overcome the supply shortage challenge in the fragmented DG market. This efficiency in procuring components and managing projects is critical to meeting timelines and budgets, ensuring on-time delivery, and allowing developers to book more projects at higher profitability rates
