I wonder how often this will happen — and how these real costs compare to doing it right in the first place, by making and storing electricity on-site?

That’s the promise of microgrids and multi-DER (distributed energy resources) in the commercial and industrial mid-market. But from my vantage point as CEO of Mayfield Renewables, a firm that sees hundreds of such projects a year, I can tell you: The technology is ready, the economics have improved — but the process is broken.

At the Great Transformation event this week in Bend, Oregon, our director of engineering, Jon La Follett will lead a panel on ways to help the industry confront that reality and move toward something much better: a shared standard for how onsite power projects are developed.

I’ve been with Mayfield Renewables for almost two years, stepping into the CEO role at a company Ryan Mayfield founded nearly 20 years ago. We sit in a niche that I’d describe as “comfortably uncomfortable,” focused on complex mid-market C&I solar and storage, often with multiple DERs and challenging existing infrastructure.

Addressing the complexity challenges of our niche requires deeply experienced engineers and a continual focus on education. For example, our engineers typically have a decade or more of experience in design and codes, and standards, especially for solar and storage. They regularly participate in internal training and lead external training as well as publish guidance and lessons learned. That combination — expertise, education, and industry-wide engagement — has led us to a hard conclusion: It’s not enough to fix one project at a time. We need to fix the process by which C&I microgrid and multi-DER projects are conceived and developed.

Where projects go off the rails

By the time our team gets pulled in, a project has usually reached the engineering phase. That’s often when upstream issues surface.

One pattern we see is unclear or misaligned use cases. Owners and developers may not have fully agreed on:

●       Which loads matter most, and how long they need to be supported

●      Priorities: resilience, bill savings, utility programs, or a stack of all three

●       How capacity built for resilience in one season can monetize the project at other times

We often find misplaced expectations around controls. As the engineer of record (EOR), our job includes ensuring compliance with codes and standards so electrons will flow safely and reliably. But we’re often told, explicitly or implicitly, “You’re doing the controls, right?”

In many cases, no one has actually been tasked with designing the control logic, the sequence of operations, and the comms architecture. The project has been sold, a battery has been selected, and the question lands in our lap: “Who’s programming the relay?”

One extreme example sticks with me. An engineer on our team was asked, “How long will the lights stay on?” The system had never been scoped or designed as a microgrid. It was a straightforward storage project that someone retroactively wanted to behave like a fully resilient microgrid.

Late-stage questions like that reveal a serious gap in the upstream process.

Sources of complexity: Controls, use cases, stakeholders

When people say “controls,” they can mean very different things. I think of them in layers:

●       Internal battery controls

●      Integrated energy storage system controls

●      Site-level hardware controls (relays, protection, etc.)

●      Site energy management systems

●       Multi-site, cloud-based coordination

As you add more asset types (PV, storage, generators, controllable loads), and use cases (resilience, time-of-use arbitrage, demand response, ancillary services, utility programs), complexity doesn’t just increase — it multiplies. A colleague put this into a matrix: number of DERs on one axis, use cases on the other. The complexity grows exponentially.

Then add a third dimension: stakeholders. For many projects, you have:

●       Developers and EPCs

●      Financiers and tax equity providers

●      Site owners and operators

●      Tenants and community members

●       Utilities and regulators

Each has its own priorities, language, and sense of risk. If you don’t align early on what the system will and won’t do, you can end up with delays, redesigns, or deals that quietly die somewhere between 30% and 100% designed.

Why we built a roadmap

For a while, we tried to address these issues with targeted services — for example, a product focused on resilience plus value stacking. That helped individual clients, but didn’t address the systemic problem.

Then we asked ourselves: “Given what we see across hundreds of projects a year, how should people be doing this?”

We stopped thinking in one-offs and defined a standardized project roadmap anchored in milestones:

●       Off-taker commitment

●      Financial close

●      Notice to proceed

●      Commercial operation

●       Operations and end-of-life

 For each stage, we laid out:

●       What needs to be de-risked

●      Which experts must be at the table

●       What analyses and decisions are required to move forward

The "Mayfield Standard" includes hazard mitigation analysis, early engagement with controls vendors, and clear articulation of use cases and stakeholder needs — all of that before the engineering phase.

The point is not to dictate a specific product, vendor, or contract structure. It’s to create a shared language and sequence so everyone knows what is expected and when.

In many cases, the parties already have the information and expertise. What they need are pathways to work together.

Unlocking the C&I mid-market

At a recent conference, I noticed the C&I mid-market was modeled with a simple, straight-line growth curve. To me, that suggests a sector whose potential is not well understood.

I believe the lack of standardization is a big reason why the mid-market lags behind residential and utility-scale generation, even with its huge potential for sorely needed new capacity this decade. If we keep doing what we’re doing, the C&I microgrid market will grow slowly, painfully, and unevenly.

When you consider events like the the grocery storage outage, the value proposition becomes very concrete. Yes, designing and building a robust system comes with a cost. But that pales in comparison with the cost of outages, lost product, and business interruption — plus the opportunity cost of failing to monetize the system in “normal” times.

A clear, widely adopted roadmap can help developers demonstrate they’ve de-risked projects in a disciplined way. It gives financiers confidence to underwrite microgrids and multi-DER systems as a recognizable asset class. It helps owners understand exactly what they’re getting — and what they’re not.

From confusion to confidence

The grid our predecessors built over a century ago was designed for low-cost, always-available power, generated centrally and distributed to simple loads. Those assumptions have eroded as we electrify more of our economy, and extreme weather and new loads, such as data centers, strain capacity.

Microgrids and multi-DER projects in the C&I mid-market are one of the most powerful tools we have to respond. They will not scale if every project remains a bespoke science experiment.

But if we align around a standard roadmap — common language, clear roles, defined milestones — complexity becomes manageable. We can unlock capital to deploy at the speed and scale the moment requires, and deliver real resilience and economic value to Main Street.

At the Great Transformation event, that’s the conversation we're excited to have.