The future of C&I solar EPCs: How software and global engineering teams are reshaping project delivery

AI automation, fixed-price engineering, and globally distributed talent are redefining how commercial and industrial solar projects move from concept to construction—and the results are stunning.

When Illinois-based Greenlink Energy Solutions decided to expand into multi-megawatt commercial and industrial (C&I) solar and storage, the company faced the same bottlenecks plaguing much of the U.S. EPC market: scarce engineering capacity, unpredictable pricing, and ballooning soft costs.

Then CEO Austin Carr sat down with Daniel Dus, founder of Cleantech Industry Resources (CIR), and realized that the traditional EPC model itself was ripe for reinvention.

“You usually only get two out of three—speed, quality, or price,” Carr said during the kickoff meeting. “CIR gives us all three.”

Within weeks, Greenlink had re-run its designs, refreshed its financial model, and queued two new projects—including a flagship casino microgrid—for construction. What changed wasn’t the crew count; it was the operating system.

Old model can’t scale

For decades, EPCs have relied on heavy, in-house teams of engineers, project managers, and procurement specialists. That structure works in a boom cycle—but it collapses under the weight of market volatility.

“Project work is lumpy,” Dus told the Clean Power Hour podcast. “If you hire to your maximum bandwidth need, the valleys kill you. We help EPCs stay lean and flex up without fixed SG&A.”

CIR calls its model “development and construction-as-a-service.”

Instead of hourly billing and opaque change orders, every activity, from a Helioscope layout to a full interconnection package, is priced as a commodity. The company’s online product catalog lists fixed rates by country, technology, and capacity. Need a 2 MW rooftop layout in New Jersey? That cost is only $186 for the Helioscope design, a four-day turnaround, and no surprises.

This approach doesn’t just cut costs; it shortens cycles. Eliminating the traditional bid-and-quote dance saves two to three weeks per project. In a market where delays can wipe out a tax-credit window, that’s real money.

A software-defined EPC

Behind CIR’s speed is a technology stack that barely existed five years ago. The 140-person team operates across three offices in India and a U.S. HQ in Vermont, executing the workload of a 500-person firm.

More than 25 enterprise-level tools, including Helioscope, PVsyst, PVcase, Energy Toolbase, Solar Anywhere, DNV Solar Compass, HOMER Grid, and others, are stitched together with proprietary automation scripts and GPT-based quality assurance checks.

“Every project that enters our system is scanned by AI,” Dus explained. “We catch panels in floodplains or easements before they ever hit permitting. Some workflows that once took 60 hours now take six.”

Clients see this precision in real time. Through a shared Monday.com dashboard, they can watch task progress, chat directly with engineers, and reprioritize work without waiting for status calls. It is the opposite of the opaque, multi-layered communication chains that plague legacy firms. It’s “ruthless transparency,” Dus says.

The power of a global bench

CIR’s hybrid workforce draws senior engineers from Burns & McDonnell, Black & Veatch, Sterling & Wilson, and TÜV Rheinland, many of whom helped deliver gigawatt-scale projects in India and the Middle East.

“Our team has executed projects much larger than those existing in the U.S. today,” Dus said. “We hire the best people in the world, wherever they are, and put them into a ridiculously advanced software environment.”

The cost delta is striking: engineers in India experienced in and trained for the U.S. market cost 85% less than their U.S. counterparts. CIR pairs that offshore horsepower with U.S. PEs for QA/QC and stamping, blending global cost efficiency with local accountability.

For EPCs like Greenlink, that means the ability to quote and deliver large C&I systems without adding permanent staff. “We’re going from installing 100’s of residential systems and a handful of commercial systems to a 10-megawatt PV and Storage project without adding fixed overhead.,” Carr said. “CIR is basically our virtual engineering department.”

Data-driven discipline

One of CIR’s most disruptive offerings may be its procurement engine. With a live database of 64,000 vendors worldwide and active RFPs across modules, inverters, racking, and balance-of-system components, CIR routinely saves clients 3 to 5 percent versus their own internal bids.

The system also calculates the “domestic-content adder,” now a critical component under the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We ask every bidder for country-of-origin data and percent domestic content,” Dus said. “Then we model different combinations together to find the lowest-cost qualified mix. Sometimes the right answer is low-cost foreign modules paired with U.S. steel and batteries; you still hit the adder, but cheaper.”

This saves Greenlink precious time and money and improves project ROI.

 AI and automation

The timing couldn’t be more relevant. As U.S. power demand surges from electrification and data centers, interconnection queues are clogged, and project delays are costly. Dus sees a clear through-line between software automation and the ability to meet this demand.

“The rhetoric says the market’s slowing, but power demand is unprecedented,” he noted. “The only way to keep up is to compress soft costs with automation and global collaboration.”

CIR’s AI-augmented workflows have now touched more than 8,500 project sites worldwide. Many are in emerging markets where grid access is limited and microgrids are the new frontier. “We’re designing gigawatt-scale microgrids for data-center operators who can’t wait five years for an interconnection study,” Dus said. “They’re going off-grid first, then tying in later. That’s the fractal grid in action.”

What it means for EPCs

For developers and builders, the implications are profound:

Traditional EPC	Software-Defined EPC
Linear, sequential workflow	Parallel, AI-assisted workflow
Fixed overhead and staff	Elastic global team on demand
Hourly billing, change orders	Fixed-price deliverables
Limited transparency	Real-time shared dashboards
Months to NTP	Weeks to NTP

Mid-tier EPCs especially benefit.  They can compete on large projects without the capital burden of a 100-person back office. Large corporates can de-risk portfolios by outsourcing high-volume engineering and procurement packages. And financiers gain confidence through standardized, bankable documentation delivered in days, not months.

The bigger picture

What CIR is doing for solar, mirrors what cloud computing did for software: turning capacity into a service. Developers no longer need to own every server or every engineer to scale.

“We don’t build for ourselves,” Dus said. “We build for the industry. Think of it as an industrial operating system for clean energy.”

For Greenlink, that operating system is already paying dividends. Two projects are in motion, with more in the pipeline. For the industry, it signals a broader shift: the age of the software-defined EPC where project velocity, not headcount, becomes the true metric of scale.

Tim Montague is president of Clean Power Consulting Group and host of the Clean Power Hour podcast. He writes about solar, storage, microgrids, and AI for the clean-energy industry.