How EPCs can de-risk solar carport projects
Some projects forgive mistakes. Carports do not.
One wrong assumption about soil, one structural detail overlooked, one steel price swing between bid and build, one buried obstruction nobody flagged or knew about, and any one of those can wipe out a project’s margin. Together they can sink a company. Carports are one of the fastest growing and most misunderstood segments of commercial solar. Schools, hospitals, manufacturers, and municipalities all want covered parking that also generates power, and researchers peg the carport segment’s growth in the low double digits, outpacing a commercial market that set records in 2025 and that SEIA and Wood Mackenzie expect to grow about 12% a year from 2027 through 2030. The raw material is everywhere: surface parking covers more than 5% of all US urban land, a footprint larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, almost none of it earning its keep beyond storing cars. The opportunity is enormous, but only for EPCs and developers who understand how these projects behave.
That was the through-line of a recent Clean Power Hour panel I hosted with three people who build carports for a living: Kyle Sinclair, CEO of Sinclair Designs and Engineering (SDE); James Strizki of GenMounts; and Matt Boyce, principal engineer at Engineered Solutions and a licensed PE in 27 states. In a live poll, 58% of attendees had completed fewer than two carport projects. Sinclair’s warning: residential and rooftop installers are walking into a segment that is the opposite of high-volume, cookie-cutter work. A typical carport runs about half a megawatt, stands 25 feet tall, and swallows 100 cubic yards of concrete, roughly ten truckloads. This is heavy construction wearing a solar hat.
De-risk the design by buying engineering early
The cheapest insurance on a carport is preliminary engineering before the bid goes out. “The EPCs that win the most have actually spent a little money for preliminary engineering, so they can provide an accurate bid based on validated information,” Sinclair said. At a roughly 30% close rate, that upfront spend gets recouped across the projects that move forward. SDE runs a four-step workflow with its partners: a geotechnical study and preliminary foundation engineering, a finite element analysis against site-specific building codes, a full internal design review, then manufacturing and deployment.
Not everyone buys that logic cleanly. John Weaver, the Massachusetts developer and general contractor known as the Commercial Solar Guy and a pv magazine USA contributing editor, has built these projects and pushes back on the economics. “You can’t do engineering on all your sales proposals. Real engineering is expensive,” he said, and at those close rates, pre-quoting every bid with paid engineering does not pencil out. His reframe flips the sequence: the moment a customer funds engineering, the deal is effectively closed. “Putting real money at stake is the same as signing,” Weaver said. “If they’re putting down real money for engineering, you’ve crossed a precipice of trust with a client.” His workaround is to break out the foundation as its own line item with a range, then convert the buyer with a small paid study: “You can drop your cost 5% by spending 15,000 dollars today and doing geotech and ground-penetrating radar. That’s a buy signal.”
The recurring villain is the ground. “The foundation is usually 99.9% of the time the hardest part of the project,” Strizki said. He has hit four-foot brick voids from old heating ducts, demolished parking garages, and six feet of uncompacted fill that looked like flawless blacktop from the surface. Boyce, who reviews projects independently, will not design without a geotech and warns that the most dangerous phrase on any site is the longtime caretaker insisting nothing was ever built there. Free intelligence beats expensive surprises: 811 locate calls for public utilities, existing geotech reports (which exist about 90% of the time, since the host building has one), web soil surveys, and a phone call to local drillers who know the subsurface.
Price the variability, not the average
Foundations are where bids quietly bleed. Sinclair gave the math directly: drilling Michigan clay with no obstructions runs about $800 per hole, but hitting hard shale at four to six feet can push that to $2,500 once crews switch to rock drilling. On a half-megawatt site, that single variable can add $60,000, a 12 cent per watt swing. That is why carports commonly land at two to three times the price per watt of rooftop, and why the deal often dies on affordability rather than engineering.
The discipline is pricing the worst case with visibility, then carrying real contingency against it. Strizki described two customer types. Some demand a single all-in number and will not reopen it, forcing the contractor to bury enough contingency to absorb collapsing holes, temporary casings, and hydrovac work without a change order. Others value-engineer and agree to share the headache of a rough foundation transparently. Both can work. What fails is discovering the overrun after crews are mobilized, with subcontractors standing idle at prevailing wage while the budget compounds.
Weaver adds a blunter coda. Carports, he argues, are simply a higher-priced market than rooftop, and the contingency reflects it. “The contingency runs a higher percentage than on a rooftop, because there’s just less risk on a roof,” he said. And the buffer rarely comes back: “It’s not like the contingency always gets paid back, because customers don’t trust it. Those numbers end up staying in the projects, because everybody has to cover themselves.” The harder cost is the customer you never see: some prospects end the conversation the moment they hear the word risk attached to construction, which quietly selects for the buyers who can stomach it.
Steel, by contrast, is the controllable line item. SDE locks a fixed rate with a material deposit and typically stocks raw material for projects under two megawatts, insulating EPCs from mill lead times. Domestic, vertically integrated manufacturing matters here: it removes the import lead-time risk that has burned the residential supply chain and keeps Plan B and Plan C foundation cages moving to the site without breaking the install sequence.
De-risk construction by respecting the craft
Carports punish corner-cutting on a delay. Boyce’s caution: new entrants tend to be light on every input, sending six people when the job needs eight, a backhoe when it needs a large material handler. Bad concrete loads and mis-set anchor bolt templates are routine, and failures rarely show on day one. Improperly drilled or backfilled foundations surface a year or two later as consolidation, undermined parking lots, and conduit added after the fact.
Strizki’s single highest-value tip costs almost nothing: walk the site with a skeleton crew a week before drilling and do an informal layout, because curb lines, storm sewers, and stepped lots that never made the drawings appear nearly every time. Start slow, then go.
Weaver’s warning is that the ground is not the only place margin leaks. Assembly methods carry hidden cost too. On a recent job he was handed a racking product that required through-bolting the modules onsite rather than having the factory pre-drill the holes. “It added a few minutes per bolt, four times per module, across thousands of modules,” he said. “That adds up fast.” The surprises still come from below, though: one customer’s sloppy survey missed a 15-foot grade drop, forcing custom steel extensions on 15 foundations just to bring the canopy level.
For all the risk, Weaver is quick to say the work is worth doing. “Building carports feels like real hard-hat construction: trenching, pouring pads, burying conduit, long wire pulls,” he said. “It’s all very fulfilling.” The unifying lesson from all three panelists, and from Weaver, is humility. As Boyce put it, the purchaser of construction has to know when they do not know, and then trust the experts they hired. Flipping a house does not qualify you to build a 25-foot steel canopy that has to carry solar for 50 years. Carports reward the teams who engineer first, price the ground honestly, and treat the foundation as the project. Everyone else is gambling with their margin.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: [email protected].
Please login to comment
Facts Only
* Carports involve heavy construction, requiring approximately 100 cubic yards of concrete and ten truckloads for a typical half-megawatt site.
* The growth in the carport segment is projected in the low double digits, outpacing commercial markets that set records in 2025.
* Preliminary engineering is presented as insurance; winning EPCs often spend money on this upfront work to provide accurate bids.
* Foundation variability causes significant cost swings; hitting hard shale instead of soft clay can increase costs by up to $2,500 per hole in drilling operations.
* A single variable related to foundation cost on a half-megawatt site can result in a $60,000 swing, equivalent to a 12 cent per watt fluctuation.
* Steel pricing is presented as a controllable line item that EPCs can insulate against variability through material deposits.
* Improper foundations or backfilling can lead to problems surfacing later, such as consolidation or undermining parking lots.
* Assembly methods, like through-bolting module racks onsite instead of factory pre-drilling, add significant labor time per installation.
Executive Summary
The solar carport segment is a rapidly growing, yet misunderstood, area of commercial solar characterized by significant risk for builders and developers. Projects are susceptible to margin loss from overlooked details, such as incorrect soil assumptions, structural oversights, or unforeseen material price swings. The market growth is projected in the low double digits, driven by broad demand from entities like schools, hospitals, and municipalities seeking power generation and covered parking.
The core risk lies in foundation work, where variability in ground conditions—such as encountering obstructions or unpredictable soil properties—drives significant cost fluctuations. To mitigate this, preliminary engineering is presented as a crucial insurance mechanism that secures accurate bids upfront. While some developers push back on the economics of upfront engineering, the process can be reframed by making the funding of engineering part of the deal agreement to establish trust. Controlling variability is achieved by transparently pricing potential overruns and ensuring contingency is explicitly accounted for in the budget, rather than leaving it as an unknown factor that surfaces during mobilization.
Finally, risk management extends beyond construction to assembly methods and site conditions. Inefficiencies in execution, such as suboptimal material handling or unforeseen site grading issues, contribute to cost escalation. The safest approach involves proactive site investigation before work begins and respecting the need for specialized expertise across all phases of construction.
Full Take
The narrative structure consistently pivots between the inherent instability of the carport market and the proposed mechanisms for managing that instability, effectively framing risk as a function of upfront knowledge and contractual transparency. The argument successfully shifts the locus of risk from the uncertainty of material cost to the certainty (or lack thereof) of subsurface conditions and execution methods.
A critical tension exists between the developer/buyer's demand for fixed pricing and the contractor's necessity to account for contingent liabilities. The discussion around contingency highlights a systemic distrust: customers are reluctant to trust budgeted buffers, leading to an outcome where risk is internalized by the contractor through higher margins, which then becomes another point of negotiation rather than true mitigation. This suggests that financial mechanisms alone cannot solve the problem; they only manage the distribution of unavoidable losses.
The theme of humility—the need for the purchaser to know when they do not know—is a profound observation about agency in complex construction. The expertise required for building carports demands an integrated understanding across geotechnical, structural, and logistics domains. When new entrants are noted for being light on input, this suggests a structural resistance against the holistic knowledge required by heavy construction, reinforcing that true de-risking requires embedding comprehensive expertise rather than simply inserting cost buffers. The ultimate implication is that value creation in this segment is less about reducing perceived risk through finance and more about establishing an unassailable standard of due diligence throughout the entire operational sequence.
Sentinel — Human
This article functions as an experienced industry discussion, weaving technical realities and practical negotiation tactics into a cohesive narrative about mitigating risk in the unique context of solar carport construction.