Across solar portfolios, actual performance frequently falls short of modeled expectations. The gap between expected and realized production is a long-standing issue, and addressing it has only grown more important as project economics change. This is not simply an equipment problem, it’s an operations one: Too many systems are not fully understood or actively managed once they are in service.
What makes this challenge particularly difficult to address is that it rarely presents itself in obvious ways. It is not typically a major outage or a clear system failure that drives losses. More often, it is a collection of small, persistent inefficiencies that go unnoticed or unresolved: Slight phase imbalances that never quite trigger concern, inverters that intermittently derate and recover before anyone takes a closer look, or tracker behavior that appears acceptable at a glance but is consistently under-optimized. Individually, these conditions can seem immaterial, but across a portfolio they add up quickly: A 2023 report by kWh Analytics found underperformance costs the solar industry $2.5 billion a year.
Data drives smarter solar decisions
Portfolio owners do not lack data on their solar assets. In fact, most systems today are producing more data than ever before, but that data is often fragmented, lacks context, or is presented in a way that does not translate into action. Many solar monitoring platforms were not built with long-term operations in mind, and while they function well as visualization tools, they often fall short when it comes to diagnosing issues or guiding response. This creates a familiar tension where operators are either overwhelmed with alerts that are difficult to prioritize or lack the visibility needed to identify more subtle performance issues, forcing a reliance on manual analysis and experience that does not scale across growing portfolios.
At the same time, the market itself has evolved. Solar assets are now supported by a broader group of stakeholders than ever before, including independent power producers, asset managers, O&M providers, and third-party service teams, all interacting with the same systems with different objectives and levels of technical depth. The handoff from EPC to long-term operations remains one of the more challenging transitions, where design assumptions are not always validated against real-world conditions. As a result, performance is not just under-optimized, it is often interpreted differently depending on who is looking at it.
This is where monitoring needs to play a more central role. It can no longer be a tool used only by performance engineers or analysts. Instead, the data must be accessible and understandable across all stakeholders while still maintaining the technical depth required to diagnose issues properly. In many ways, these systems tell a story about how an asset is behaving, and the challenge is ensuring that everyone involved is reading the same version of that story.
That shared understanding becomes especially important when work arises that is not always planned or budgeted. In many cases, the technical team can clearly identify an issue and understand its long-term impact, but that urgency does not always translate to asset managers or capital decision makers. Without the proper context, these issues can appear minor or deferrable, and approval is delayed until performance degradation becomes more visible or more costly. When the data provides clear context and communicates the operational and financial impact, it becomes much easier to align stakeholders and move from identification to action, whereas without that, alignment delays are inevitable as teams work to reconcile differing interpretations of system performance.
Equally important is the level of detail that is captured and surfaced. Portfolio averages and high-level KPIs can mask localized issues that persist over time, and without visibility into component-level behavior and the ability to compare performance across systems and timeframes, many of these inefficiencies remain hidden in plain sight. Context also plays a critical role, as a fault or alert on its own rarely provides enough information to act and only becomes meaningful when it can be tied back to electrical behavior, historical trends, and system design.
Managing energy value in-house
As an energy professional of many years, I’ve seen firsthand the immense cost that portfolio owners bear as a consequence of underanalyzed performance data. A recent commercial client of ours at NextWave was experiencing what they thought was underperformance, but which turned out to be a simple data management issue.
The company had begun the process of hiring an outside asset management firm to find a solution before realizing that they could get value they needed from their energy systems by implementing better data management. In a less costly move, they adopted a monitoring system with a more intuitive portfolio dashboard, and trained their in-house team to manage their assets, no contractors required.
This example, among many in the solar energy industry, represents a portion of the billions of dollars in lost value that can be recovered by implementing smarter data capture, analysis, and decision making.
Alignment turns performance insights into action
Identifying an issue is only part of the equation, and the speed at which it is addressed ultimately determines its impact. Monitoring should therefore be viewed as an active part of the operational workflow that drives prioritization, coordination, and resolution rather than as a passive layer of reporting.
As the industry continues to mature, the next gains in performance are unlikely to come from hardware alone. They will come from improving how systems are observed, interpreted, and managed over time. For asset owners and operators, this requires a shift in perspective, including a closer look at whether current tools are truly surfacing lost value or simply confirming that systems are online, and whether all stakeholders are working from a shared and reliable understanding of performance.
Many of the most meaningful opportunities for improvement are already visible within the data being collected, but they are not being surfaced or acted on consistently. The gap between expected and actual performance is present across portfolios today. Closing that gap will depend on the industry’s ability to see these issues clearly, align around them, and respond before small inefficiencies become permanent losses.
Nader Yarpezeshkan is the founder and CEO of NextWave Energy Monitoring, an industry-built monitoring platform for commercial, industrial, and utility-scale solar assets that combines intuitive PVPulse software with U.S.-manufactured grid-edge hardware and onsite engineering services. A veteran of the solar industry, he has worked across the full project lifecycle, from origination and development through long-term asset operations and performance management. Nader also serves as co-founder and president of Phoenix Renewable Services, an engineering-driven operations & maintenance provider specializing in preventive and corrective maintenance, inverter refurbishment, and repowering services for solar and energy storage systems throughout the United States.
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