As part of Solar Media’s deep-dive research analysis into the full-audit trail of the 630 completed solar farms in the UK with capacity rating >250kW, the Solar Intelligence team is shortly to release the first of our Top-10 tables, starting with EPCs.

With the total secondary asset market in the UK for solar farms sitting at 5.3GW across 630 sites, the top-10 lists are therefore not just the result of a few hits, but significant cumulative deployment. So, if you are a top-10 player, then you’ve been winning and completing lots of projects for some time.

In terms of EPCs, the definition of EPC can be somewhat misleading, so we are sticking with our in-house methodology at Solar Media of ‘Lead EPC’, although there are many (often mainland Europe based) sub-contractors that play a key role in EPC work, and many that claim EPC ownership also.

In fact, we are not stopping at the Top 10. Our ongoing research is actually looking to get a minimum of a Top 50 for internal analysis, and to track some of the new entrants that have started to see market wins as the average site size has declined during the 1.3 ROC fiscal period.

While Solar Media has been gathering market intelligence on the UK market since pre-feed-in tariff (FiT) days back in 2010, the latest research activities focus on matching EPCs to all known completed sites, taking us right up to the end of Q2 2015 (30 June 2015).

To ensure that the analysis is correct, and fully substantiated, EPC totals by company are derived purely bottom-up, from confirmed site completions. This avoids one of the big problems that often detract from rankings, in relying upon company’s own in-house press output that does not say specifically where the site is, when it was done, and what the exact capacity installed was. So, just to emphasise again, our Top-10 tables will only be done by adding known site completions and aligning this with similar research being done on developers, site owners, and component suppliers.

In fact, our analysis for Top-10 lists will be applied bottom up for all of the 630 completed sites: project developers, completed site owners, component suppliers, etc. All too often, ranked lists get generated simply by comparing press releases from selective companies – thereby obviously missing information from those companies that simply don’t put top-line data out into the public domain and are either completely ignored in the lists or have a wild guess entry assigned.

So back to the question…Are you a Top-10 EPC for solar farms in the UK? 

Well, if you have not installed more than 150MW so far in the UK, then you won’t get onto the list! But the big question is: of all the EPCs that have installed more than 150MW in the UK until now, who are in the top 10 and how do they rank?

Lots of EPCs have ‘claimed’ to be number one for solar farms in the UK, but will there be a surprise at the top of the table? Have there been some stealth-like EPC champions, busy building sites in the Q1 2015 chaos, that chose to keep it all quiet while others proclaimed MW totals for all to hear and be impressed with.

The results will be provided by Solar Media very soon, after the final survey data has been checked, and checked again. So, if you’ve not heard from us, and you have a claim to the >150MW top-league status, then get in touch with us now! 

In fact, since we are going to get all the way to the Top-50 (practically covering the entire ground-mount segment), then get in touch with us now, and we will make sure our internal research matches to your completed sites. This is especially true on the sub-5-MW sites, where the pool of EPCs is going to increase much more than seen before in the UK solar industry.

But let’s end with a teaser. It looks like the top EPC is not from southern Europe – now does that help you in any way?