How you buy onsite energy systems is the biggest lever you control. Buyers who know what they need before going to market and make suppliers compete on the same information can cut procurement to 9-12 weeks. Projects run this way consistently come in 20-45% below the price of traditional approaches.
If you don’t know what you should be buying before you go to market, the market will happily decide for you, and the answer will be built around the seller. We refer to this as being a price taker and believe it is one of the main reasons profitable onsite energy projects go unbuilt.
By the end of this post, you’ll know what to decide on before you talk to a supplier and how to build a competitive procurement process that protects you from overpaying and building the wrong system.
Why does the way you buy onsite energy matter so much?
Onsite energy is power generated or stored at the facility that uses it, such as rooftop solar and battery storage. A system is physical infrastructure that will sit on your roof or property for 25 years or more, wired into your operations, your balance sheet (if you purchase outright), and your risk profile. The decisions you make in the first few weeks of buying a system compound for decades.
The National Laboratory of the Rockies found that non-labor soft costs (consulting, engineering, strategy, permitting, contracts, and procurement) make up an average of 28% of the total cost of commercial solar-plus-storage projects. That makes how you buy the biggest lever you can control.
We recently analyzed a commercial solar system a customer had already installed. The panels were performing better than expected, but the system was twice the size it should have been. The developer had filled the roof with solar to maximize their contract value, and the customer was overproducing energy they could not use or sell past their net metering limits. The oversizing eroded the project’s net present value (NPV) by 50%.
This didn’t happen because someone cut corners. The developer did exactly what they are incentivized to do, which is to sell a system that meets their customer’s requirements while also maximizing their return. In the example above, the system met the customer’s financial goals, but could have been more lucrative if it was sized properly. And then perhaps the customer would have more capital on hand to invest in other projects.
What should you determine before you ask suppliers for bids?
Before a single supplier sees your project, you should own four things.
The first is knowing what your preferred outcome is in terms of economics, resilience, energy access, and sustainability. Each outcome needs to be defined and weighted, because it shapes everything downstream.
The second is knowing what system is right for your facility, ideally built as a digital model that you can test and scenario plan, with the load profile, tariff structure, roof and land constraints, outage risks, incentives, capital structures and installation costs.
The third is getting your data room full with utility bills, load data, as-built drawings, roof condition, electrical infrastructure, and the assumptions behind your own model. Bids are only as good as the data they are built on, and garbage in, garbage out shows up later as change orders.
The fourth is deciding how you plan to pay for the system with cash, a loan, a lease, or a power purchase agreement. This should be determined in the modeling step (hence the capital structure above). If a supplier can’t structure the deal the way your finance team needs it, they shouldn’t be invited to bid.
Do this work and suppliers take you seriously and attract better developers who will submit better proposals. The best developers and engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) firms are booked out and triage every opportunity that comes their way. A tight, data-rich brief gets their A team, and a vague request gets a rushed proposal padded with risk allowances, if it gets a response at all.
How do you run a competitive process for onsite energy?
Onsite energy is a custom solution delivered by a fragmented market of thousands of regional and local specialists. A generic Request for Proposal blasted to the market wastes effort on all sides. Instead, get the best proposals back (and ultimately the best project) by curating the right field, telling them what you need, and making the field genuinely compete.
Five filters matter: geography and local experience, size and technology fit (experience within about 30% of your target size), financing fluency, safety and quality record, and actual capacity, since the best firms juggle multiple large projects competing for the same crews and components.
A field of 3 to 6 bidders is ideal. That is enough tension to drive competition and few enough to manage, and every bidder knows it has a real shot to win the project.
Plan to open the bidding window for around three weeks for most solar and battery storage projects. Host a structured Q&A in the first week where every bidder sees the same answers at the same time, with no side conversations or back channels, and schedule a single site visit that every bidder attends together.
A developer’s cost of sale can run up to around 20% per project, and those sunk costs get baked into the price of every project that moves forward. A curated process removes much of that waste, and suppliers price accordingly.
When you receive the proposals, resist the reflex to sort by price. Instead, use a scorecard built on the criteria you published in the RFP, build a risk heat map, and run a total value analysis that normalizes every bid over the full contract life, including escalators, maintenance, and performance guarantees. The cheapest option can often hide expensive exclusions. Finish with a best and final offer round for your two or three finalists, and negotiate on lifecycle economics and total cost of ownership.
What does a well-run process look like in practice?
A 120-year-old food distributor ran this exact process for a new cold chain facility in Florida in VECKTA’s onsite energy marketplace, with a tight construction timeline, a 2 MW utility cap, and shifting federal tax credit rules. They went from opportunity analysis to signed contract in two quarters, received bids 20% below market benchmarks, and locked in a right-sized 1.8 MW rooftop system projected to save $5 million over its life.
Their director of construction told the VECKTA team that the process let them take ownership at every step, giving them the control they needed. Preparation creates speed, and speed matters, because energy rates rise, opportunity costs stack, incentive programs expire, and interconnection queues fill up.
What are the three common routes that cost buyers control?
When a company decides to get serious about onsite energy, there are three traditional pathways companies follow to buy a system, and they may head down each one at different points for the same project. One is paying a consultant to do an analysis. Two is going to a bidding platform or straight marketplace to get proposals. Three is going straight to a developer (worst outcomes) or developers. Each feels like progress, and each can quietly take away control.
The consultant study
Energy is complex, so hiring experts and commissioning a study is an understandable instinct. VECKTA’s CEO and co-founder learned from his years in energy consulting that hourly billing rewards more studies over results, and that every engagement starts by rebuilding data and vendor analysis, which he call the reinvention tax.
Many consultants do excellent work, particularly on technical expertise and digging deeper into risk management and considering a wider scope of organizational priorities. VECKTA works with energy advisors who represent the buyer to provide them with the intelligence and workflow to deliver faster.
The bid platform
Bid platforms sound like the modern answer, and the logic is half right, since a marketplace can reach a fragmented market. Access alone doesn’t tell you what you should buy, and without an assessment of your sites, loads, and tariffs, more bids just means more incomparable proposals. One bidder delivers a proposal with a 20-year solar-only PPA with an escalator, another quotes a lease, and a third adds storage with a revenue-sharing agreement, so your team becomes a translation service.
Reverse auctions go further in the wrong direction. They reward the lowest sticker price on an asset that must perform for 25 years, potentially making the cheapest project initially the most expensive over the long term.
Straight to the developer
This is the most common path and often the most expensive. A developer provides a proposal, either solicited or unsolicited, and the company interprets that as a free consultation or analysis telling them what they should be buying.
Some arrangements also require rights to future projects, which can lock you into a deal that falls out of touch with the market.
One company came to us with an energy-as-a-service bid in hand from a leading developer, recommended by their private equity firm. The rate looked great at ten cents less than their utility rate, and they were ready to sign. After VECKTA’s intelligence platform and marketplace data said it was high, they ran an informed competitive process instead and signed at a rate twice as low, locked in for 25 years with no escalation.
That single decision added $4.5 million in energy cost savings and pushed total lifetime savings past $25 million.
The developer did nothing wrong; they quoted within what the market could bear while considering what they need to operate a business for the long haul. Developers need to protect some level of margin so we can continue having great suppliers in the market. A well-run process creates opportunity for them too, because more good projects get built and the all-in costs come down.
In each of these cases, someone else holds the information advantage, and you pay for it in fees, inflated pricing, or an asset shaped around someone else’s incentives.
What does the better path look like?
Intelligence first, curation second, competition third. Know your sites, loads, and right system before approaching the market. Build a shortlist of 3 to 6 genuinely qualified suppliers that you chose on purpose. Then run identical data, a structured Q&A, scoring, and a best and final round, and lead throughout.
This is the model we built VECKTA’s onsite energy marketplace procurement process around, because we have seen every other model fail buyers.
An energy system is infrastructure that will either compound value or deteriorate return over time. Energy savings, new revenue from energy sales, and operational resilience all flow to EBITDA, and at today’s multiples that is enterprise value, which makes how you buy a fiduciary responsibility.
The playbook exists, and the companies using it are quietly building an energy cost advantage their competitors will spend the next decade trying to catch up to.
