Why real-time data is the key to smarter renewable energy investments

Good data informs renewable energy project financiers. Great data empowers them to act. 

This was the main takeaway from “How Developers & Lenders Can Use Existing Operating Data to Inform Future Investment Decisions,” a panel discussion at Infocast’s 2025 Solar + Wind Finance & Investment Summit in Phoenix, Ariz., last month. The session, moderated by Dentons partner Matthew Neumann, featured a suite of industry experts, including representatives from Enfinity Global, 1st Source Bank, CoBank, and Zions Capital Markets, as well as Banyan Infrastructure COO and co-founder Amanda Li.

During their wide-ranging conversation, the panelists dived into the value project financiers gain from leveraging clean, transparent, real-time data, allowing them to address issues on existing projects and inform future investments.

Jeffrey Buhr, executive VP and chief credit officer at 1st Source Bank, kicked off the conversation by speaking to underperformance issues in the renewable energy industry. As renewable energy asset managers gather more data points, they are gaining deeper insight into why a project might underperform, Buhr explained. This includes delays in addressing operations and maintenance issues, overly optimistic shading estimates for solar assets, and weather-related concerns such as wind and snow. 

While Buhr has used data to inform future decision-making — these insights have led his firm to adopt a higher debt service coverage ratio, for example — Mark Culpepper, Enfinity Global’s head of global asset management, took the conversation a step further, suggesting that energy companies are not power providers but, rather, data providers. Without the real-time availability of trusted data, banks and investors are less likely to do business with power producers, he argued.

“Data is essentially what the bank is buying,” Culpepper explained. “If they trust your data, then you've got a good sales proposition. If they don't trust your data, then you’ve got a bad sales proposition.”

Banyan Infrastructure’s Amanda Li pointed out that clean, consistently available data provides lenders with the insights they need to chart their next steps, too. Asset management software and project finance software can work together to help all stakeholders maximize profits. The more granular the data, the more lenders are able to understand what is contributing to — or detracting from — a project’s success and take the steps required to resolve those issues.

The real challenge arises in delivering and acting upon this consistent, real-time data across a large number of projects, she added. With renewable energy set to dominate power-sector growth again this year, portfolios are expanding. For lenders, finding a cost-effective method for monitoring these vast amounts of real-time data requires a more thoughtful approach, Li said. Identifying how digital tools and human decision-making can work together to provide the best return on investment will be an ongoing practice for lenders. 

“All systems, all data sets are not created equal,” Li told the audience. “They don't all push the margin. So, almost everything you track should lead back to… profit, revenues.” Understanding the implications of various data points, too, will help lenders to distinguish between minor hiccups and more serious risks and outcomes, she added.

Beyond today’s real-time data, artificial intelligence is a promising tool that is already transforming other areas of the renewable energy sector, Li noted. Project financiers can benefit from this technology, too, to support their deal-making and portfolio management efforts. But today, tech inertia is slowing down renewable energy project finance. First, lenders need to bring clean, high-quality data online.

“There is so much low-hanging fruit right now,” Amanda explained. “It feels like, in some ways, [renewable energy financiers] are being left behind, where there's the next generation of insights occurring in other industries that have adopted Tech 1.0, 2.0 because their data is online, their data is being aggregated, their data that can therefore produce insights. 

“You cannot gather insights easily from your piece of paper or your offline spreadsheet. It has to be first transformed, cleaned up, and fed into the machine in order to then output those insights. And so, if you can catch up to that, then there is a future using AI tools right that can do amazing things.” 

This first step of digital transformation is bringing the mountains of data associated with each project or portfolio into a centralized data room, this can pose a hurdle to project financiers. But the benefits of overcoming this initial setup are many, Li explained. Building a single source of truth with clean, organized information lays the foundation for valuable, data-driven insights that can shape future deal-making strategy as well as automated reporting and other digital tools.

For lenders ready to make the switch, Li has one piece of advice: Don’t go it alone. 

“Find partners throughout all of this,” she advised. “If you're going with a data strategy, it's about who you have around you to provide that. We don't want, as you go down that path, [for you to say],’ I need to build everything myself.’ Find those around you who can support your data journey.”

Are you ready to transform your project finance operations? Reach out to Banyan Infrastructure today for more information.