- The useful early-stage output is not a single number. It is a sharper decision: proceed, redesign, reduce scope, pause or stop.
- An industrial PV+BESS project is not just an energy model — it is a bundle of approval, land, connection, contract and cashflow risk. A pretty IRR that ignores four of those five is not a project.
- F1–F4 screen the four places a project actually breaks: approval delta, site suitability, microgrid / connection boundary, and financeability readiness.
- Inside those sit five working questions — technical fit, customer avoided cost, contract revenue, carbon value, bankability. Most failures happen at the boundary between two of them.
- A good screen does not remove uncertainty. It makes uncertainty visible early enough that the project can still be reshaped cheaply.
Why this matters
Most early industrial energy conversations start with hardware — array size, battery duration, inverter choice, container layout — and end with an IRR. The problem is that a feasibility-study mindset arrives too early. It spends effort proving a chosen design works, before anyone has checked whether the project can be approved, sited, connected and financed at all. By the time those questions surface, real money has been committed to the wrong version of the project.
A Pre-DD screen is deliberately cheaper and more sceptical. Its job at this stage is not to produce a bankable model — it is to find, from public information, where this specific project is most likely to break, and whether that break can still be designed around. That is a different instrument for a different moment.
The useful output is a decision, not a number
Early-stage data is soft by nature: load is approximate, diesel prices move, EPC costs are indicative, customer credit is unverified, debt terms are unnegotiated. A screen that pretends otherwise — that hands over a precise IRR to three decimal places — is selling false confidence. The honest output is a decision the project owner can act on:
Each of those is a good outcome if it is reached early. “Stop” on a public-data screen costs a few weeks. “Stop” after EPC quotation, legal structuring and investor engagement costs a great deal more.
An industrial PV+BESS project is not an energy model
A spreadsheet can make almost any project look attractive if it is allowed to assume the hard parts away. The hard parts are rarely the energy balance. They are:
- Approval — does the project fit the existing pathway, or trigger new disturbance, licence, water, heritage or closure issues?
- Land and site — is there somewhere the equipment can physically and legally sit?
- Load and connection — what slice of the load can actually be served, and where is the microgrid boundary?
- Contract — can the value be converted into a payment obligation someone is bound to pay?
- Financeability — does the resulting cashflow support debt on terms a lender will accept?
F1–F4: a practical screen
The four screens map onto exactly those break points. They are run together, not in strict sequence — but each asks one clear question.
F1 · Approval Delta
What new approvals, variations or conditions does adding PV+BESS trigger, relative to the site’s existing consents? The delta — not the absolute approval burden — is what adds time and risk.
F2 · Site Suitability
Where can the array, storage, PCS and interconnection realistically go, given layout, setbacks, watercourses, roads, pipelines and closure areas visible on public maps? “Empty land” on satellite is not the same as usable, consentable land.
F3 · Microgrid / Connection Boundary
What load slice can actually be served, and how do PV, BESS, diesel, PCS, EMS and site loads connect? This sets the boundary the commercial case has to live inside — explored in Weak-grid mines do not buy cheap energy.
F4 · Financeability Readiness
Which cashflow can be contracted, invoiced and underwritten? This is where customer savings and project revenue get separated — the subject of the first mistake in BTM BESS feasibility.
The five questions inside the screen
Underneath F1–F4 sit five working questions I keep returning to. They are not a checklist to tick in order — they interact, and most projects fail at a boundary between two of them:
- Technical fit — is the system sized to the real, predictable load, not the rare peak?
- Customer avoided cost — what does the customer genuinely stop paying, against a credible baseline?
- Contract revenue — how much of that avoided cost becomes stable, contracted SPV revenue?
- Carbon value — is it quantified, correctly assigned, and kept out of double-counting?
- Bankability — does the contracted revenue support debt service at a coverage ratio a lender will accept?
Notice that four of the five are commercial and financial, not technical. Whether the battery works is rarely the binding question. Whether the project can be paid for, contracted and financed — and for whom it actually creates value — is where it lives or dies.