Every quarter we publish a single number our clients care about more than almost any other: the share of projects we energize on or before the contracted commercial-operation date. Across the 480 projects we have delivered in 18 years, that figure now sits at 94 percent. We report it because a promise about a date is only worth as much as the record behind it, and because the years it drops tell you more than the years it holds.
The number is not our own arithmetic. Since 2019 we have had it verified annually by an independent engineering auditor, who reconciles each project’s signed COD against the utility’s interconnection service agreement and the actual first-megawatt timestamp from the meter. A project counts as on-time only if it delivered power to the grid on or before the date in the contract — not a revised date, not a milestone we renegotiated midway. Partial energization does not count. Extensions we requested do not count in our favor.
What the dips actually taught us
In 2021 the figure fell to 87 percent. Two projects in the Texas Panhandle — a 74 MWac plant near Amarillo and a 51 MWac site outside Lubbock — slipped by nine and fourteen weeks when a transformer supplier’s lead time went from 40 to 68 weeks with no warning. We could have quietly rebaselined and kept the headline at 94. Instead we published 87, wrote up the root cause, and changed how we buy: long-lead switchgear and main power transformers are now ordered against a signed EPC contract rather than at notice-to-proceed, which moved procurement roughly eleven weeks earlier in the schedule.
That single change is why 2022 and 2023 came back to 95 and 96 percent respectively, across a combined 61 projects and just over 2.1 GWp of capacity. The recovery was not luck; it was the direct output of having told the truth about a bad year and then spending money to fix the cause.
The metric also shapes what we decline. When a developer asks us to commit to a date that our schedule model puts below an 80 percent confidence band, we say so in writing and offer the date we can actually hold. We have walked away from roughly 30 MW of work a year on those grounds. It costs us revenue and it protects the 94.
If you are evaluating an EPC, ask for the audited on-time figure, the definition behind it, and the worst year in the record. A partner willing to show you the dip — and what they did next — is telling you how they will behave when your project is the one under pressure. That is the whole reason we keep publishing it, unflattering quarters included.
