🇺🇸United States

Over‑ and under‑scoped replacement due to poor damage assessment quality

3 verified sources

Definition

Claims documentation often relies on incomplete ground inspections or emerging tools like drone thermography, which engineering experts note have important limitations for detecting all forms of PV damage. This can lead to modules being unnecessarily scrapped or, conversely, hidden damage being missed, both of which create recurring financial harm.

Key Findings

  • Financial Impact: In hail events where claims range from $5M to $80M per site, even a 5–10% mis‑classification of modules due to poor assessment quality can translate into hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in unnecessary replacement or latent‑defect risk.
  • Frequency: Every significant weather‑damage claim requiring large‑scale module or tracker assessment
  • Root Cause: Reliance on rapid, high‑level inspection techniques (e.g., drone thermography) without adequate ground‑truthing and standards, combined with insurer pressure to quickly quantify losses, produces systematic errors in determining which equipment is damaged beyond serviceability.

Why This Matters

This pain point represents a significant opportunity for B2B solutions targeting Solar Electric Power Generation.

Affected Stakeholders

Independent engineer, Loss adjuster, Owner’s engineer, O&M provider, Insurance underwriter

Deep Analysis (Premium)

Financial Impact

$100K-$1.5M (REC price re-negotiation penalty @ $5-$20 per REC × 100K-500K REC shortage due to mis-scoped replacement = $500K-$10M contract loss) • $1M-$8M (PPA penalty @ $50K-$100K per day × 20-100 day claim resolution delay due to conflicting assessments) • $200K-$2M (Council rejects full replacement due to perceived over-scoping; hidden damage surfaces later; city faces 5-10 year performance loss = $500K-$2M lost generation revenue + public relations damage)

Unlock to reveal

Current Workarounds

Email chains with site operator about module replacement timeline; manual Excel model re-run for REC generation forecast; phone call renegotiation with REC buyers • Email coordination with insurance adjuster; Excel budget tracking; council presentation with PDFs of drone thermography images • Excel pivot table of damaged modules; email surveys to member utilities for approval; manual billing spreadsheet for cost allocation

Unlock to reveal

Get Solutions for This Problem

Full report with actionable solutions

$99$39
  • Solutions for this specific pain
  • Solutions for all 15 industry pains
  • Where to find first clients
  • Pricing & launch costs
Get Solutions Report

Methodology & Sources

Data collected via OSINT from regulatory filings, industry audits, and verified case studies.

Evidence Sources:

Related Business Risks

Under‑recovered revenue from production downtime after weather events

Industry analyses cite a single hailstorm in West Texas causing roughly $300M of losses, much of which related to lost production and business interruption; recurring hail‑driven losses globally are in the hundreds of millions of dollars over multi‑year periods.

Escalating repair and soft costs from large weather‑damage claims

Industry consultants report solar farm hail claims in the $5M–$80M range per site, and one widely publicized West Texas hailstorm damaged about 400,000 modules and produced the largest single solar insurance claim to date (on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars).

Slow, disputed claim settlements delaying cash recovery

Individual solar weather claims commonly reach tens of millions of dollars; when settlements take many months, owners can incur millions in additional interest, liquidity stress, and deferred repair costs beyond the nominal insured loss.

Extended generation capacity loss from preventable extreme‑weather damage

GCube data cited by industry media show hail made up just 1.4% of US solar insurance claims by count but 54% of total losses, with one insurer reporting $342M in hail claims across 1.3M modules and 2.7 GW of capacity between 2019–2025.

Indirect penalties and contract breaches from delayed restoration after weather events

For utility‑scale PPAs, availability or performance shortfalls of just a few percentage points over a year can cost owners hundreds of thousands to several million dollars in liquidated damages, on top of unrecovered repair and revenue losses.

Inflated or strategically scoped claims in complex hail and wind losses

Given that single‑site hail claims commonly reach $5M–$80M, even modest intentional inflation of damaged‑module counts or repair scopes can misdirect hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per event.

Request Deep Analysis

🇺🇸 Be first to access this market's intelligence