What AI Can Do for Solar Asset Managers
Sep 23, 2025
There are two revolutions taking place right now. The first is the rise of AI and increasingly sophisticated reasoning models.The second is the global shift to renewable energy.
Solar will be the energy supply story of the 21st century
In 1956, solar power cost around ~$2000 per kW — the equivalent of ~$2million per kW. By contrast, today utility-scale solar can be built for under $200 per kW, a cost decline of more than 99%. This dramatic fall has made solar not only accessible but cheaper than fossil fuels: globally, solar plants now generate power at around $25 per megawatt-hour, compared to $37.51 per MWh for coal1.
It took nearly 70 years (1954–2022) to reach the first 1 TW of solar capacity. The second TW was added in just 2 years (2022–2024).
By the end of 2024, global solar PV capacity hit 2.2 TW, up from 1.7 TW in 20232
AI - and LLMs and reasoning models in particular - are already a technological step change for the 21st century
Similarly, AI research has been underway for decades, but the recent breakthrough with large language models (LLMs) has been just as transformative. For years, AI could beat world champions at chess but struggled with tasks like understanding natural language or creating art. With LLMs, that’s changed: models can now generate human-like text, summarise complex documents, write code, and even assist with decision-making. What was once considered the “hard problem” in computing — teaching machines to communicate and reason with language — is now becoming an everyday tool, accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
These two shifts — the rise of AI and the rapid scaling of solar — are converging. Both are reshaping industries, breaking cost and performance barriers, and creating opportunities that would have seemed impossible only a decade ago. And it’s at this intersection that Solar Manager is operating: bringing the power of automation and intelligence to solar asset management.
In the US residential market, soft costs (e.g. human, non-hardware layer costs) now comprises 57% of a solar asset’s system costs. Whilst human oversight and strategic direction will remain critical to the development and management of solar assets, many systems and processes are legacy, and not fit for purpose for 2025. So what can AI - and automated workflows - do for Asset Managers?
1. Immediate Context from Unstructured Data
Asset managers deal with a flood of unstructured, often disjointed information. Different file types: PDFs, spreadsheets, word documents, PowerBI. Multiple topic areas: financial (e.g. cashflow statements, invoices), legal (e.g. PPA agreements, land leases), operational (e.g. O&M tickets, technical advisor reports).
Traditionally, this could mean hours of searching through folders, emails, and PDFs just to answer a simple question.
With AI, this bottleneck disappears. Natural language search allows you to query across all your documents instantly:
Which spare parts is my O&M contractually expected to hold? How does this compare to my existing inventory according to the spares audit? Where are the gaps?
What’s the last invoice on this site? Why are we struggling to meet our debt cover ratio?
Instead of hunting for files, Solar Manager can identify best practices, compare across documents, and extract the exact insights you need in seconds. This means faster decision-making, better compliance, and fewer costly oversights.
2. Automated Reporting
Asset managers deal with a significant number of complex reporting requirements. Reports to the Board, to equity investors, to lenders, to organizational stakeholders. Asset Managers are constantly required to report updates about their assets.
AI, and automation workflows are perfectly positioned to support asset owners to automate reporting. For our clients we take generation data, O&M tickets, and financial information and merge and summarize the context for asset owners.
This means we can generate your board reports in seconds, not weeks.
3. Scheduling and Orchestration of Work
Running solar assets requires juggling countless recurring tasks: compliance checks, preventative and corrective maintenance, vegetation management, shading assessments, and panel cleaning. Each of these has its own cadence, dependencies, and budget implications.
AI excels at orchestration - developing optimal schedules that balance cost, compliance, and performance. For example, it can:
Balance Opex vs. Revenue priorities, highlighting when preventative maintenance will save long-term costs.
Recommend O&M intervals and interventions based on weather data, dust levels, and generation impact.
Identify when spares parts are mission-critical, and might need ordering on an asset.
This allows asset managers to move from reactive firefighting to proactive planning - and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
4. Agent Communication
Asset managers often act as the bridge between multiple stakeholders - field engineers, contractors, asset owners, and boards. Each interaction creates delays, miscommunications, and administrative overhead.
AI agents - intelligent software systems that can act autonomously on behalf of users - introduce the possibility of direct agent-to-agent, or agent-to-human communication, bypassing traditional human intermediaries. Instead of asset managers manually coordinating between parties, specialized AI agents can help.
Imagine an AI assistant that::
Autonomously requests for an O&M provider or engineer to complete a job.
Summarise field reports for the board in plain English.
Coordinate with financial systems to reconcile invoices automatically.
Run tenders for specific service partner requirements.
These specialised agents can talk to each other, ensuring everyone gets the right information at the right time. This reduces the “back-and-forth” and frees asset managers to focus on strategy rather than administration.
For example, we’ve recently built an AI Whatsapp bot so that Engineers can get notifications about assets straight to their phone, in real time. Engineers can interact directly with the O&M tickets - and reduce the back and forth with Asset Managers.
A future that combines the best of AI, automation and human oversight
At the time of writing this article, Solar Manager has deployed hundreds of custom AI agents for our clients, saving countless hours of work and letting asset managers focus on the highest-value initiatives.
If you’d like to find out how you could benefit from our solutions, reach out to us here
1: https://www.greenmatch.co.uk/blog/decrease-in-solar-costs
3: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-soft-costs-basics