I have sat in enough project meetings to know how they go.
The contractor presents beautiful slides. The yield simulation shows impressive numbers. The payback period looks attractive. The performance guarantee sounds reassuring. Everyone in the room nods. The plant manager asks two or three questions. The legal team reviews the contract language. And then somebody signs.
I have reviewed projects in Morocco where the system was underperforming silently for over 18 months — with losses ranging from 8 to 14% below projected yield — and nobody had flagged it because the monitoring dashboard still showed green.
Nobody lied. Nobody acted in bad faith. But nobody had the honest conversation before the contract was signed. And that silence is costing real people real money — every year, on projects that should have been excellent investments.
This article is the conversation nobody had with them. I am going to have it with you.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend technical resources that I consider genuinely useful for industrial solar professionals working in Africa and the MENA region.
Why this conversation is so rare
Before I get into the specifics, I want to be honest about why this conversation almost never happens.
The contractor needs to close the deal. The consultant was hired by the developer and has an interest in the project moving forward. The bank wants to deploy capital. The plant management wants to show results to their board.
Everyone at the table has an incentive to focus on what can go right — and a reason to stay quiet about what can go wrong.
The person who has no financial stake in the transaction — the independent field supervisor, the experienced O&M manager, the engineer who has already lived through the first three years of a similar project — is almost never in the room.
This is the structural problem. And until you understand it, you cannot protect yourself from it.
The five things nobody tells you before you sign
1 — The performance guarantee protects the contractor, not you
This is the most important thing I want you to understand.
A performance guarantee sounds like protection. In reality, most performance guarantees I have seen on industrial solar contracts in this region are written to protect the EPC contractor from liability — not to protect the client’s financial returns.
Read the exclusions carefully. Soiling losses are almost always excluded. Grid curtailment events are excluded. Any deviation from the assumed irradiation baseline is excluded. Temperature effects beyond a certain threshold are excluded.
What remains after all the exclusions is a guarantee that covers only the most catastrophic and obvious failures — the kind that would be caught and repaired regardless of any contractual obligation.
I have seen a performance guarantee that, after reading all the exclusions, effectively guaranteed nothing beyond what common sense would require anyway.
Before you sign — ask your lawyer to list every exclusion in the performance guarantee clause. Then ask yourself honestly : what is actually left?
2 — The yield simulation is optimistic by design
I want to be precise here because this is not a criticism of simulation tools — PVsyst, PVGIS, and SAM are excellent when used correctly.
The problem is the inputs.
Every yield simulation requires assumptions about soiling losses, temperature coefficients, inverter efficiency curves, and irradiation data. Each of these assumptions has a range of possible values. And in competitive bidding situations, contractors — consciously or not — tend to select the more optimistic values within each range.
The result is a yield simulation that represents the best plausible scenario rather than the most probable one.
I have personally reviewed feasibility studies for industrial projects in Morocco that applied a soiling loss of 1.5% annually — on sites where our own field cleaning data shows 5 to 8% is the realistic figure for industrial environments. That gap alone translates to a 3 to 6% overestimate in annual yield — compounded silently over 25 years.
Ask for the P90 production estimate — not just the P50. The P90 figure tells you the production level that will be exceeded 90% of the time. If the contractor cannot provide a P90 estimate, that tells you something important about the quality of their analysis.
3 — The O&M contract is an afterthought — and it should not be
In my experience, O&M is the part of the solar contract that receives the least attention during negotiation and causes the most problems during operation.
The EPC contract gets weeks of legal review. The O&M contract gets a few days — if that.
Yet it is the O&M contract that determines what happens to your investment for the next 25 years. It determines how quickly a fault gets repaired. It determines who is responsible for cleaning and how frequently. It determines what monitoring data you have access to and in what format. It determines whether you will know in real time if your system is underperforming — or whether you will find out 18 months later when someone finally looks at the numbers carefully.
At the cement plant where I work, I have seen firsthand what happens when O&M responsibilities are vague. A string underperforming by more than 15% went undetected for months because nobody had clearly defined who was responsible for string-level monitoring and what the response protocol was.
Before you sign — the O&M contract needs as much attention as the EPC contract. Define response times explicitly. Define monitoring protocols explicitly. Define cleaning frequency explicitly. Define what constitutes underperformance and what the response obligation is.
If the contractor resists this level of specificity — that resistance is the most important information they have given you.
4 — The commissioning process is where most problems are created
This surprises people. They assume that problems develop gradually over years of operation. In my experience, most long-term underperformance issues are created during the commissioning phase — and simply not discovered until later.
A string connected with reversed polarity. An inverter configured with incorrect MPPT settings. A grounding bond that was never properly completed. A monitoring system that shows operational but is not correctly calibrated to the revenue-grade meter.
None of these create an immediate alarm. All of them create a persistent, silent drag on performance that compounds over years.
Your EPC contract must require a documented commissioning protocol with specific acceptance criteria. Specifically, insist on :
— Performance Ratio measurement at commissioning against a clear-sky baseline. The real-world range I observe on well-commissioned industrial systems in Morocco is 77 to 84%. If your commissioned PR falls below 77% under clear sky conditions, something is wrong and needs to be investigated before you sign the acceptance certificate.
— Full infrared thermography of all modules at commissioning — not six months later.
— String-level IV curve tracing — not just inverter-level output measurement.
Do not sign the commissioning acceptance certificate until these measurements are complete and within acceptable ranges. Once you sign, your leverage disappears.
5 — Cheaper is not cheaper over 25 years
This is the conversation that plant managers and investors find most uncomfortable — because it challenges a decision that has often already been made by the time the technical team is involved.
In competitive tendering for industrial solar projects in this region, the price difference between the lowest bid and the best-value bid is typically 15 to 25% of total project cost. On a 2 million USD project, that is 300,000 to 500,000 USD.
That number looks significant in a procurement meeting. It looks very different when you calculate what it means over 25 years.
A system installed with lower-quality components and less rigorous commissioning that underperforms by 5% annually costs approximately 18,000 USD per year in lost electricity savings on a 2 MWp project in Morocco. Over 25 years — 450,000 USD in lost value. From a procurement decision made to save 300,000 USD upfront.
The numbers do not work. They never work. But the 300,000 USD saving is visible on the day of contract signature. The 450,000 USD in lost value over 25 years is invisible — distributed across 9,000 days of slightly lower-than-expected production, each day unremarkable in isolation.
Before any procurement decision is made on a long-term infrastructure project — calculate the cost of underperformance, not just the cost of installation. Ask for a 25-year financial model that includes realistic O&M costs, realistic degradation rates, and a realistic soiling scenario for your specific industrial environment.
If the procurement committee is only looking at Day 1 cost, they are missing 99% of the financial picture.
What a good contract actually looks like
I want to be constructive here — not just critical. Here is what the honest conversation before signing should produce.
A yield simulation that includes
A P90 production estimate. A soiling scenario validated against real data from similar industrial environments in your region. A temperature derating model that accounts for actual summer conditions at your site. An irradiation dataset cross-referenced from at least two independent satellite sources.
A performance guarantee that specifies
Exactly what is measured and how. Exactly what is excluded and why. A clear, unambiguous remediation process if guaranteed performance is not met — including financial penalties that are proportional to the actual revenue impact, not symbolic figures.
A commissioning protocol that requires
PR measurement against a clear-sky baseline before acceptance. Full module infrared thermography. String-level IV curve tracing. A documented handover of all monitoring system login credentials, calibration records, and baseline performance data.
An O&M contract that defines
Maximum fault response time by fault category. Cleaning frequency calibrated to your specific industrial environment — not a generic residential assumption. String-level monitoring with automatic deviation alerts. Monthly performance reports in a format that gives you genuine insight into system behavior — not just a single green dashboard indicator.
For project developers and plant managers who want to understand the technical foundations behind EPC contract specifications — particularly yield simulation methodology and performance guarantee frameworks — Solar Energy Engineering by Kalogirou — provides the technical grounding that makes contract negotiation much more concrete.
I am a Solar PV supervisor at a cement plant in Morocco. I did not write this article to criticize contractors or to suggest that the solar industry in Africa and the MENA region is dishonest.
Most contractors are competent and act in good faith. Most consultants genuinely believe their yield models. Most performance guarantees are written by lawyers who have never stood on an industrial solar site and do not fully understand what they are excluding.
The problem is not bad faith. The problem is that the honest conversation — the one that acknowledges real soiling rates, real commissioning risks, real O&M gaps, and real procurement trade-offs — is structurally absent from the pre-contract process.
Someone needs to have that conversation with you before you sign. Not after the system is running and the problems have already started.
The solar resource in Morocco and across the MENA region is extraordinary. The technology works. The economics are real. The only thing standing between a good project and a great one is the honest conversation that happens — or doesn’t happen — before the signature.
If you are currently evaluating a solar PV project for an industrial facility in Africa or the MENA region — and you want an independent technical review of your contract terms, your yield model assumptions, or your O&M specification — the contact form is open.
More articles coming soon — AI applications for solar performance monitoring, and a field guide to selecting the right EPC contractor for industrial projects in this region.
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Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend technical resources that I consider genuinely useful for industrial solar professionals working in Africa and the MENA region.
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Solar PV MENA Expert