This checklist is for deciding whether a commercial solar lead deserves design time, a site visit, and a written proposal. It covers the facts you should have collected, and verified, before a lead is promoted from a conversation into a tracked opportunity with a real budget behind it. The items are deliberately concrete: most failed commercial solar deals died because of something on this list that nobody confirmed in week one.
Use it during the first two or three contacts with a prospect, after there is genuine interest but before anyone produces a layout or a savings model. It is not a diligence checklist for a project under contract and it is not a design review. It is the screen that determines whether the next stage is worth funding, and its most valuable outcome is often a clean, early no.
Resource Hub · The Energy Academy
Solar Lead Qualification Checklist
Qualify a commercial solar lead before you spend design and proposal time on it, from the utility account to early disqualifiers. Tick items as you confirm them, mark what does not apply, and print or export your list.
Start with who you are actually dealing with, because every other answer depends on it. The person who takes the first meeting is frequently not the person who can commit the organization, and the organization in the conversation is frequently not the legal entity that would sign.
The bill is the single most informative document a prospect can give you, and the rate structure behind it determines whether solar produces meaningful savings at all. Collect it early and read the tariff rather than the summary line.
Annual consumption alone will mislead you. What matters is when the load occurs relative to production, because self-consumed energy and exported energy are usually worth very different amounts.
Physical qualification decides whether the project can be built at all. Most of it can be done from imagery, documents, and a short conversation before anyone travels.
Interconnection cost and timing kill more otherwise attractive commercial projects than any other single factor, and the answers are rarely available from the customer. Screen for them before pricing anything.
Solar agreements run for many years and they attach to real property. If the customer does not control the property for the full term, someone else is a party to the deal whether they know it yet or not.
The ownership structure that fits depends on the customer's capital position, tax position, and creditworthiness. Establishing this early prevents you from modeling an option the customer cannot use.
A customer with no deadline has no project. Anchor the timeline to events that exist on a calendar rather than to stated intentions.
These are the findings that should end a pursuit rather than trigger more analysis. Write down at the outset which of them apply to this deal, so the decision is made while you are still objective.
Adapt the items to your project and use them alongside the governing documents and your advisors. Ticks and notes stay on this device only.
How to Use This Checklist
Work it in order rather than by topic convenience. Authority and property rights come before load analysis because they are cheaper to check and more often fatal. Anything you cannot answer is itself a finding: record it as open with an owner and a date, and treat a long list of unanswered items as a signal that the lead is not ready for a proposal.
This checklist does not replace a site visit, a structural assessment, an interconnection application, or professional review of the customer’s tariff and agreements. It is a screen, and screens are approximate by design. Its purpose is to tell you where to spend real engineering and legal money, not to substitute for it.