As the renewable energy sector experiences unprecedented growth, with global renewable electricity generation expected to reach into the terrawatt range soon, asset managers face increasing challenges in managing complex portfolios. While spreadsheets remain a ubiquitous tool for data management, their limitations and hidden costs are becoming more apparent, especially in the rapidly expanding renewable energy sector.
A sobering statistic reveals that 90% of spreadsheets containing more than 150 rows have at least one significant error, according to a recent report. In an industry where accurate financial reporting, performance tracking, and compliance monitoring are crucial, this error rate poses substantial risks for renewable energy operators and their stakeholders.
Consider the case of a New York-based clean energy portfolio company, managing a diverse portfolio of renewable assets in investment lifecycle management software. The company has 259 commercial & industrial (C&I) solar projects with 49 personnel managing 437 vendor and supplier contacts. Its portfolio has over 10,000 pieces of equipment from 79 different manufacturers, generating data from five different APIs and producing 600 documents with approximately 28,000 active tasks at any point in time. Managing this scale of operation through spreadsheets would be not just inefficient but potentially hazardous to business operations.
So why do people use spreadsheets? Simply put, because they can. The initial appeal of spreadsheets lies in their apparent cost-effectiveness. Most computers come equipped with software like Microsoft Excel, leading many to believe that using spreadsheets is essentially “free.” However, this perception ignores the substantial hidden costs associated with manual data management. Spreadsheets are not just inefficient—they pose a significant risk because errors can compound quickly.
The challenge becomes particularly evident in common scenarios faced by renewable operators. Many organizations manage individual projects as separate entities, each with its own accounting, investors, and partners. When portfolio-level reporting is required, managers often resort to creating complex spreadsheets with multiple tabs, manually exporting data from different sources and creating summary sheets. This manual process not only increases the likelihood of errors but also consumes valuable time that could be better spent on strategic decision-making.
Contract management presents another critical challenge. Renewable energy projects typically involve numerous contractual obligations with varying schedules – some annual, others quarterly or every few years. The complexity deepens with dynamic royalty payments to multiple landowners, where calculations shift based on development stages and power generation metrics. When project milestones slip in the development and construction phase – even by just a week – the ripple effects can cascade through quarters. Some deadlines can have dramatic consequences. For example, missing the property tax filing deadline once, could put the project’s sales tax exemption in jeopardy.
Modern software solutions can help transform this chaos into clarity by centralizing all project financials in a single database, enabling portfolio-wide analysis with a few clicks and automatically generating customized reports for different investor types, whether they’re invested in specific projects or the entire portfolio.
Software by industry users for industry users
When software is designed by asset managers from the renewable industry there are several advantages over traditional spreadsheet-based approaches. These platforms standardize asset management across organizations, providing structured frameworks for managing users, contacts, and contracts. They offer standardized equipment catalogs, document management systems, and integration capabilities that streamline obligation tracking and reporting processes.
Maintenance prioritization transforms from guesswork to precision through advanced asset management tools that harness real-time data analysis. By comparing three key metrics: actual generation, forecasted output, and expected performance, the software can instantly calculate revenue and production losses when equipment fails. This becomes particularly powerful for C&I companies juggling multiple operations and maintenance (O&M) providers, diverse equipment portfolios (often spanning thousands of units from dozens of manufacturers), and a constant stream of maintenance tickets.
The software can create sophisticated maintenance waterfalls by analyzing each piece of equipment’s contribution to energy loss, automatically ranking tasks by their dollar impact on the bottom line. This data-driven approach transforms raw data into actionable intelligence.
Does size matter?
Does an organization’s size matter in a high-growth market when adopting modern technology? No, not when it is scalable.
Alameda Municipal Power, a public utility serving over 70,000 customers through multiple clean sources (geothermal, biomass, wind, and hydroelectric), keeps an operations team of close to 40 people very busy every day. The complexity of task management and obligations of one organization can be as demanding for a single utility as for a diverse C&I company.
For organizations considering the transition from spreadsheets to dedicated software solutions, the message is clear: the sooner the transition, the better. Most modern platforms offer scalable solutions that allow organizations to start with basic functionality like obligation tracking, and gradually add capabilities such as performance monitoring, reporting, and field service management. Organizations can also expand towards the earlier development phases where key decisions are made, and early data capture can improve future operations.
Perhaps most importantly, modern software solutions free professionals from the tedium of manual spreadsheet management. Instead of spending countless hours manually updating and cross-referencing spreadsheets, asset managers can focus on analyzing insights and making strategic decisions that improve portfolio performance.
The future of renewable energy asset management lies in automated, integrated solutions that can scale with portfolio growth while maintaining accuracy and efficiency. As the industry continues to mature and portfolios become more complex, the ability to manage assets effectively will increasingly depend on embracing purpose-built technological solutions that eliminate the hidden costs and risks associated with spreadsheet dependency.
Eric Baller, chief product officer at Radian Generation, is a technology entrepreneur and software / engineering executive with a passion for delivering innovative products. He has a successful track record developing scalable, rich web applications and building high-performance teams focused on cloud-based software-as-a-service and the Internet of Things.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
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