Solar Asset Managers - we feel you. After literally hundreds of interviews with solar PV asset managers - we think we’ve found the root cause of your professional pain and suffering.

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If you manage assets, you probably spend a fair chunk of your day wrestling with data. Different inverter portals, mismatched formats, endless CSVs exports, and half a dozen spreadsheets!

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And, it’s this problem that’s costing your so much time each and every day, increasing the risk of data handling errors, and holding you back from truly scaling your O&M offering and portfolio.

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The problem is Data silos.

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Yep. Whilst, no one actually says out loud “my data is stuck in silos” - everyone feels it.

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In this blog post, we share insights from our market research, exploring what data silos look like in the real world - and why they make running solar operations so much harder than it should be. We also paint a vision from a utopian world, free of data silos, and the pain it creates.

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At a minimum, we hope you get a little therapy and comfort from reading this - because, let’s face it - asset managers work hard, but suffer in silence (and get none of the glory of the solar sales team!).

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1. The Inverter Portal Maze

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Every portfolio starts with generation data.

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And because no one uses just one inverter brand, most companies are juggling four, five, sometimes ten different portals — each with its own quirks, data intervals, and fault codes.

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“We’ve seen teams spend half their mornings logging into different portals just to download CSVs…. That’s before they’ve even started looking at performance.”

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That’s Orkestra team member, Tyler Jackman, who has the honour of chatting every day with solar asset managers.

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“Each portal interprets faults differently, data formats don’t line up, and a single missing timestamp can throw off an entire report.”

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The result: even a simple monthly generation summary becomes an Excel project.

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2. Weather and Benchmarking Data

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Once you’ve got generation, you still don’t know if that’s good or not.

Is the system underperforming, or was it just cloudy?

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As Orkestra co-founder Chris Cooper, put it:

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"The leading asset managers actually pull in weather data - for example, from the weather bureau - and line it up with inverter readings to build their own benchmarks. But, that's so much work that most people simply don’t bother.”

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According to our 2025 C&I Solar Industry Census, 53% of companies offer performance guarantees, but very few can actually proactively prove compliance - not because they don’t care, but because the data lives everywhere except in one place. Instead - the performance guarantees are typically only assessed if a customer requests a check.

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3. Fault Codes and Alerts

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Each inverter brand speaks a different language — hundreds of unique error codes. Some teams literally have specialists whose entire job is to decipher them.

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To quote one asset manager,

“It’s like learning six dialects. You go to bed knowing which error codes to ignore, then wake up to a new list.”

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Triaging through the noise is exhausting and time consuming. You end up spending hours sorting false alarms instead of focusing on genuine performance issues.

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4. Customer and Tariff Data

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Then there’s the question every customer eventually asks: “How much money am I actually saving?”

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That’s where most asset managers groan. The inverter tells you generation, but not consumption, export, or tariff details.

To answer that one question, you need gate meter data (import and export), plus you need to collect bills, type in tariff data, reconcile exports, and calculate often complex demand charges — all manually.

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As one operations lead we spoke to stated:

“I spend more time proving to customers that their system’s working — when I already know it is — than fixing real problems”

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Because it’s such a heavy lift, most companies don’t do proactive reporting at all. And many solar companies actually stop talking to customers completely - because they live in fear of a customer asking this obvious question.

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And that hurts trust. Customers stop asking questions because they know the answers will take a long time to arrive. And future opportunities to further monetise the relationship are missed.

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5. The PPA Layer: Where the Silos Multiply

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For PPA operators, everything above is just the start.

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Now add billing, PPA rate tables, and payment reconciliation — all managed in Excel. Every asset can have its own PPA rate, indexation formula, and billing logic.

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So the process looks something like this: extract the meter data → clean it → apply the rate → check for errors → upload it into another system → send it to finance.

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“Just getting one invoice out can take days,” one PPA manager told us. “And every handoff is another chance for error.”

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Finance teams don’t see performance data. Asset managers don’t see who’s paid. Investors ask for consolidated performance and revenue reports — but those have to be stitched together from five different systems.

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The result - reporting week becomes chaos.

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Your data silos - visualised

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Why It Matters

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These silos aren’t just annoying. They cost time, money, and credibility.

• Customers can’t see their savings.
• Analysts spend days doing repetitive menial tasks, instead of managing assets
• PPA teams can’t scale without hiring more people.

And the biggest irony? In our 2025 C&I Solar Industry Census, 81% of respondents said existing customers are critical to their future success — yet so many are flying blind when it comes to giving those customers clear, timely performance updates.

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Breaking the Silos

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The solution isn’t another spreadsheet. It’s about bringing everything together: generation, weather, consumption data, tariffs, and financials — in one view.

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When that happens:

• Customer reporting becomes effortless
• Benchmarking is in real time
• Billing matches real performance

And most importantly, customers trust you — because they can see exactly what’s happening. As one of our customers put it:

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“Once we had all the data flowing in one place, we stopped firefighting and started actually managing.”

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When your data stops living in silos, your business does too.

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