Roof-first thinking
Roof area is a fraction of the sun-facing surface on most commercial buildings. When only the roof is assessed, the largest solar surfaces in the portfolio never enter the numbers.
Most portfolios value the roof and ignore the façade. SolaMaxa scores every candidate surface — roof, glazing, spandrel, canopy — on a comparable basis, and models the economics including the conventional envelope cost a BIPV proposal avoids.
Roof area is a fraction of the sun-facing surface on most commercial buildings. When only the roof is assessed, the largest solar surfaces in the portfolio never enter the numbers.
Without a comparable basis, the loudest or earliest pitch sets the agenda. Capital follows whoever quoted first — not necessarily the strongest opportunity.
BIPV replaces envelope: cladding, glazing, spandrel. A commercial model that prices BIPV as a bolt-on never credits the conventional envelope spend it displaces.
Investment committee asks where the yield came from, what the cost scope includes and whose assumptions they are. Fragmented workflows struggle to answer.
Every building scored on the same explainable basis — solar potential, deployable surface, economic return, carbon, constructability, utilisation and data confidence — so the ranking is defensible.
The commercial model separates gross cost from credits — including avoided conventional envelope — so the net incremental investment, payback and NPV reflect what the project actually spends.
Generation, cost and carbon figures with their assumption provenance — and reports whose figures map to calculation workpapers, so scrutiny lands on the assumptions, not the arithmetic.
When a proposal earns investment, the same platform takes it to market: a controlled RFQ from the accepted strategy and quotes normalised to comparable bases.
The commercial model keeps gross project cost, incentives and the avoided conventional envelope credit as separate, visible lines before computing net incremental CAPEX — the split is never hidden inside one net figure.