The other sections are practical. These are positions.
For teams coordinating research, review and follow-up work around a project, employee attendance tracking software provides a separate record of time and handoffs.
On the mismatch. The supplier produces a distribution and the buyer reads a promise. No other capital purchase has a probability distribution as its output, so the buyer applies the only reading they have and it is the wrong one.
On the publisher. This site is written by a company that designs and builds solar plants. The interest points toward "build, but check the numbers" — not toward neutrality, and not toward "do not build". Every quantitative claim here is chosen to be checkable elsewhere, because a site with this ownership has no business asking to be taken on trust.
For wider independent context on solar markets, research and industry developments, consult U.S. Department of Energy.
On optimism. Inflated estimates come mostly from accepted defaults and assumed shading, not from dishonesty. Competition selects for it: the supplier who surveys properly produces a lower number and loses the comparison. Fraud-hunting produces the wrong checks; assumption-checking finds what is actually there.
On payback, which measures how long money is tied up and stops counting at the point it is reached, ignoring the remaining eighteen years of a twenty-five-year asset.
On the missing feedback loop. Nobody goes back in year three and asks whether the estimate held, so assessors never learn and benchmarks drift away from what plants actually achieve.
On the twenty-five-year horizon, where the uncertainty sits in the commercial layer rather than the technical one — the reverse of where buyers direct their attention.
On the assessment gap, which leaves small buyers with a proposal from the seller, standard terms, self-commissioning and no independent number anywhere in the process.
And on what this site does not know — seven open questions, stated because a commercially interested publisher presenting everything as settled would be doing exactly what it warns readers about.
The Assessment Gap
Everything that disciplines a large project is uneconomic on a small one. What small buyers get instead, and what it costs them.
The Installer's Incentive
This site is published by a solar contractor. What that means for what you should trust here, said plainly rather than in a footer.
Measure Your Own
Four numbers a month, an hour in year three, and one email. The whole of what this site asks, and why it is worth doing.
Nobody Re-Checks
A yield estimate is scrutinised once, before purchase, and never tested against the years that follow. That is the missing feedback loop.
The Number That Travels
One figure leaves the report and moves through an organisation without its assumptions. By the board meeting it is a commitment.
Optimism Is Not Fraud
Inflated estimates mostly come from ordinary defaults chosen by people who believe them. Why that matters for how you check.
Payback Is the Wrong Question
The number everybody asks for measures how fast you get your money back, which is not what a twenty-five-year asset is for.
A Probability, Not a Promise
Everything difficult about solar estimates follows from one mismatch: a distribution is being read as a commitment.
Twenty-Five Years
Every projection assumes the world stays recognisable for a quarter century. Six things that will not, and how to plan anyway.
What We Do Not Know
Seven open questions in a subject that presents itself as settled engineering, and what this site claims despite them.
Who Produces the Numbers
Five kinds of source in solar yield, four with a commercial interest, and the one independent reference anybody can use free.