Solar Energy Editing and Proofreading Services

A householder is shown a figure: this system will generate 4,100 kWh a year and save you £940. They sign. Two years later the meter says 3,600, the electricity price has moved twice, and they are certain they were lied to. Usually nobody lied. The number was a modelled annual mean presented as a promise, and everything that would have made it honest was in a paragraph nobody wrote.

We edit what solar developers and installers produce — generation and yield estimates for domestic and commercial customers, savings and payback calculations, quotations and system specifications, performance ratio and loss assumption documentation, shading analysis and site assessment reports, warranty and workmanship documentation, operation and maintenance agreements, grid connection and export documentation, planning and permitting submissions for larger schemes, investor and lender yield reports, and customer guidance on monitoring and expected performance. Our editors work on the number the customer will check against their meter.

The generation estimate is where solar businesses build trust or complaints, and it fails by presenting a modelled central case without its variability or its assumptions. We work through these so the estimate is given with a range across years and the statement that any individual year may fall outside it, since annual irradiance varies by roughly ten per cent either way and a customer who was told to expect one number treats a normal year as a failure; so the assumptions are listed where the number is, covering the shading assessed, the tilt and orientation, the assumed degradation rate and the inverter and cable losses; so the saving is separated from the generation, because generation is a fact about the roof and saving is a fact about electricity prices, self-consumption and the customer's habits, and combining them attributes price risk to the installer; so the self-consumption assumption is stated as a percentage with what it depends on, given that a household in all day and one out all day have entirely different economics from an identical array; so payback is presented under two or three price scenarios rather than as a single figure; and so the first-year figure is distinguished from the long-run average, as year one on a new array is usually the best year the customer will have. Estimates written this way produce customers who recommend you.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, quotations and customer information. We are editors rather than solar designers, energy assessors or financial advisers, and we offer no view on yields, savings or system performance. What we can do is make the number survive contact with the meter.