By: Garth Jensen, Technical Director, Develop Network

Partners can enjoy more benefits from the next evolution of DSD Connect.

While some may know DSD through our connection to BlackRock, one of the largest renewable energy financiers in the world, we’re actually developers at heart. This dual perspective has given us unique insight into unprecedented opportunities to enable commercial and industrial (C&I) solar energy partners to rapidly deploy more renewable energy across the U.S. We’ve seen how quick, reliable, and repeatable financing has been mastered in residential solar but remains a hurdle for getting commercial solar and industrial solar energy projects across the finish line.

Determined to remedy this, we launched DSD Connect – a first-of-its-kind solar financing platform built for, and by, developers – last year. Now, we’re excited to share an updated version designed to provide a clearer pathway for our partners to demonstrate their value and profitability with their customers.

If you’re familiar with our first iteration of DSD Connect, you’ll know that it focused on the earliest stage of the sales process by providing developers with immediate project pricing, NDA and collaboration agreements, and access to our robust resource library. Since we first launched the platform, we’ve listened closely to our partners and have incorporated feedback to increase DSD Connect’s functionality to include enhanced and improved commercial tools to help our partners win more deals. At a glance, the new technical features will allow developers to:

• Generate new sales collateral
• Save summaries of pricing inputs and outputs
• Evaluate the relative economics of multiple projects within an opportunity
• Upload project designs and spec sheets for frictionless bid reviews and analysis
• Generate term sheets for faster awards

Preview the evolved version of DSD Connect

In this new evolution, we took care to focus on a seamless user experience for our partners. We’ve also improved its integration with DSD internal systems, which will allow us to make quicker, and broader updates in the future to continuously add value. Overall, our intention with this new version of DSD Connect was to provide our developers with more:

With that said, while efficiency, customer service, and accessibility to our expertise is the reasoning behind the platform, DSD Connect is not meant to replace the valued human connections we have with our partners – it’s meant to complement them.

Oftentimes, commercial and industrial solar projects looking for a third party financier do so at a later stage in the process than is ideal. Our goal with DSD Connect is to come in as early as possible to take out the uncertainty and need to backtrack on work that’s already been done and provide developers with everything they need at the onset. Ultimately, we aim to work hand-in-hand with C&I partners in a way that hasn’t been done before.

We’ve long considered ourselves the one-stop shop for design, financing, engineering, and asset management among large-scale, custom solar PV, energy storage solutions, and electric vehicle charging stations. Now, we have an intuitive tool that’s helping us put the power in the hands of our partners and customers through access to best-in-class capital to help them win more deals, ownership capabilities, immediate indicative pricing, rinse-and-repeat processes, faster NTPs and CODs, and exceptional customer service.