How solar is sold in Singapore
Almost every deal is commercial and almost every roof is complicated
Land is scarce, so the market lives on rooftops belonging to factories, warehouses, schools, malls and institutional buildings. Very few of those roofs are simple. The occupier who would buy the energy is often a tenant, the roof belongs to a landlord or an industrial estate, and the structure needs an engineering assessment before anything is fixed to it. A deal therefore involves at least two organisations and several people inside each of them, long before a single panel is specified.
The clock runs in quarters, not weeks
Whether the customer buys equipment or buys energy under a long-term offer, the decision passes through facilities, sustainability, finance and often a regional head office. Credit reviews, board approvals, landlord consent, structural assessment and the applications required to connect and energise a system all queue behind each other. Demand is increasingly driven by corporate carbon targets and by customers asking their suppliers to report emissions, which puts a sustainability lead in the room who cares about different things from the finance approver sitting beside them.