EDF Renewables promotes early-stage siting partnerships to reduce distributed solar project failures and delays
EDF Renewables thinks utilities and electric cooperatives are getting distributed solar wrong from the very beginning. The company — with over 35 years of development experience and more than 16 GW of projects across North America — has published guidance arguing that the standard request-for-proposals process routinely sets distributed generation projects up to fail. Their fix? Partner with a developer at the siting stage, before any formal solicitation even begins.
EDF Renewables calls for early siting partnerships over RFP process
EDF Renewables’ Distribution-Scale Power team has developed more than 1,550 MW of solar and storage projects nationwide. That track record drives their core recommendation: bring in a development partner early — well before a project goes to market. Rather than running a competitive bid process, they argue utilities and cooperatives should work closely with an experienced developer from the siting stage onward, defining needs, mapping constraints, and identifying viable locations before a formal solicitation ever enters the picture.
The company draws a clear line between utility-scale and distributed generation contexts. RFPs can work reasonably well for large grid-scale assets in deregulated markets — places with public interconnection queues and access to the broader transmission grid. For front-of-the-meter DG projects, though, that same approach frequently falls short, and when it does, costs escalate quickly.
To tackle these challenges, EDF Renewables uses proprietary software built to analyze the load profile characteristics of specific distribution systems.
Why the RFP model falls short for distributed solar
On paper, an RFP for distributed solar can look pretty solid. You get a varied mix of projects — different locations, maturities, pricing structures, capacity levels — which feels like genuine choice. EDF Renewables describes this as potentially “a misleading morass” rather than real optionality.
The problems tend to surface after a contract is already signed. A project selected for its attractive pricing might later trigger additional state or utility regulatory review that nobody anticipated during bidding. Interconnection studies can reveal that the project’s capacity exceeds what the local distribution system can actually handle — especially when back-feed constraints onto the transmission system come into play. Capacity gets cut. Sometimes considerably.
That reduction sets off a chain reaction. Smaller projects lose construction economies of scale, making the financials far less attractive. Landowners and communities that signed on expecting a certain project size end up disappointed. In some cases, the developer loses its interconnection priority entirely, pushing the project even further back in an already crowded queue.
Consequences of poor siting: Wasted resources and missed opportunities
By the time these issues become obvious, utilities and cooperatives have usually burned through significant resources — staff time, legal fees, consulting costs, due diligence work — on a project that ultimately doesn’t deliver. That’s a real cost on its own.
There’s a second cost that’s harder to quantify. While an organization is tied up chasing a problematic RFP-sourced project, other viable distributed solar opportunities can slip by unnoticed. The window for a well-sited, appropriately sized project in the same service territory doesn’t stay open indefinitely.
Interconnection queue backlogs make this even more painful. In many parts of the US, those queues already involve multi-year delays, so a poor siting decision doesn’t just waste resources on a failed project — it can push an organization’s distributed solar timeline back by years. EDF Renewables also points out that transparency around distribution-system infrastructure remains limited and fragmented across the country, which makes navigating these constraints without specialized expertise especially tricky.
EDF Renewables’ proprietary approach to optimized siting
To tackle these challenges, EDF Renewables uses proprietary software built to analyze the load profile characteristics of specific distribution systems. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model, that analysis drives tailored project solutions matched to what a given system can actually support.
Their engineering team brings decades of collective DG solar experience to capacity and interconnection challenges — the kinds of technical obstacles that, without the right expertise, can delay or kill a project entirely. Regulatory and energy markets are monitored nationwide, with that intelligence used to ensure projects are sited in ways that meet clients’ economic requirements, not just their technical ones.
One more specialized capability stands out: siting solar on environmentally sensitive or previously contaminated land. EDF Renewables has extensive experience converting former landfills, brownfields, and wastewater treatment plants into productive solar facilities — an approach that sidesteps many of the land-use conflicts that can complicate greenfield siting.
Distributed solar benefits driving utility and cooperative interest
Demand for distributed solar isn’t slowing down. Electric cooperatives, municipal utilities, and investor-owned utilities are all actively working to integrate DG solar into their generation portfolios, pushed by a mix of policy targets, customer expectations, and straightforward economics.
The appeal is genuine. Distributed solar offers a low-cost, fuel-free, zero-carbon electricity source that helps organizations meet renewable energy commitments, and projects create local jobs while responding to growing customer demand for sustainable power — benefits that extend well beyond the balance sheet.
EDF Renewables positions its full-service model — spanning development, engineering, construction, and operations — as the most reliable path to capturing those benefits. The argument is straightforward: the earlier a qualified partner is involved in siting decisions, the better the odds of building a project that actually gets built, performs as expected, and delivers real value to utilities, cooperatives, and the communities they serve.
Kelly is an experienced writer with 15 years of experience exploring the big stories that shape our world, from tech breakthroughs and space exploration to climate, energy, and the fascinating quirks of science. She has a talent for turning complex ideas into sharp, memorable insights that stay with readers long after they’ve finished reading.
