The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) have extended their support for the truSolar Working Group’s efforts to develop uniform open source risk scoring standards and rating criteria for solar projects. These standards would facilitate lower transaction and capital costs and improve project finance liquidity within the commercial and industrial solar segment.
“truSolar represents a valuable opportunity to create a common approach to characterizing solar project benefits and risks and more precise alignment on pricing of project capital,” said NREL Senior Financial Analyst Michael Mendelsohn.
Roger Hill, principal member of technical staff at Sandia, added, “This initiative could potentially lower transaction costs, and improve access to financial capital critical to solar project deployment. We will be examining the risks inherent in projects to sharpen our analytical tools for criteria and assessment in technical areas including yield and reliability.”
The truSolar Working Group was established on January 14, 2013 as a collaborative consortium of 16 solar industry market leaders dedicated to addressing a broad array of project risks through the development of uniform standards. The founding members of truSolar, led by Distributed Sun and DuPont Photovoltaic Solutions, are among the leaders in solar project asset management, development, financing, manufacturing, insurance and ratings agencies. Founding member companies include ABB, Assurant, Inc., Mosaic, PanelClaw, SMA America, Standard & Poor’s, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Rocky Mountain Institute.
“On behalf of our founding members, we are pleased to welcome the National Labs to our initiative,” said Chase Weir, chief executive officer – Distributed Sun a member of the consortium. “We are excited about the opportunity to work closely with the National Labs, and the SAPC initiative currently led by NREL, to develop comprehensive, complementary solutions for the solar industry, by the industry.”