If you have a team of developers and a history of in-house software development, building your own renewable energy software might seem like the logical decision.
But we often hear from organizations who’ve begun a renewable energy asset management software development project — only to be forced to abandon the work due to scale, complexity, and other unique challenges they encountered along the way.
In addition to the stories we hear from the organizations that end up becoming our customers, we also know from personal experience that renewable energy asset management software must meet many evolving demands. The industry is rapidly changing and growing, with hardware, software, and processes that are still being refined and optimized. Keeping up with all of these changes is a lot to ask of any software team.
Let’s look at some of the factors that can make in-house renewable energy software development difficult — and potentially undeliverable.
Software development can be deceiving. On the surface, the challenge seems doable. You can see that you’re faced with something big, but that’s okay because you have skilled people who know how to handle it.
But, as work begins, the true scale of the problem is revealed. After six months of development, you discover that one component of your IT environment is incompatible with your new application.
After another three months slide past, your team reports that a key feature requires code expertise that they don’t have. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
On any software project, there are usually one or two people who know the entire application inside and out. To mitigate this risk, tech companies take steps to institutionalize this knowledge and incentivize key people to stay with the company long-term.
But, incentives or no, jobs are no longer lifelong positions and people change jobs more frequently than they did in the past. While this is inevitable, it can be dangerous for software teams that rely on a few key people who own the application. One departure can leave you with a crushing technical debt — and more delays.
Developing renewable energy software is likely to take 12–24 months depending on how many developers you have available to dedicate to the project. With testing and bug-fixing, it could be years before you have functional software to manage your renewable fleet. Few companies can wait this long for a solution to be fully operational — and that’s assuming it ever is.
Your in-house team of developers might be ready and willing to build your solution, but there’s still a risk that what you want is not what you’ll get.
Even with stringent processes, clear specifications, and the most detailed of requirements, what you asked for can be lost in translation. Then, after months of development, you discover that a key feature is missing and hundreds of hours have been spent building a solution for the wrong problem.
Choosing a third-party solution helps with the “known-quantity” factor: The features are already built and the capabilities are well-defined. You can evaluate the software on its actual — rather than theoretical — merits, knowing the full extent of its current feature list.
For non-software companies, developing a new application could end up being an expensive distraction. Software projects can take entire teams many months of effort — and the result might be ineffective, bug-ridden, and expensive to maintain.
Consider: While the new software is being developed, which other tasks and upgrades are your developers being forced to put off?
In-house software seems to offer greater potential for customization. In theory, this sounds right: If you build your own software, you can build it any way you like. You can build all the features that your stakeholders demand. You can build the perfect solution for your organization.
The reality usually looks more like this:
You give your developers a list of requirements, and they start work on planning the build. After two months, they report that some of your requirements are unachievable within your timeframe.
You proceed with a simpler approach, missing out on some of the core functionality. After another 18 months and many technical hiccups, the software is ready to use — but it can't handle the data volumes your growing fleet generates. Performance degrades. Alerts are missed. Your developers are patching rather than improving.
In the meantime, you discover that your competitors are producing more energy from a smaller fleet. They have a clearer picture of performance across wind, solar, and storage assets — and they're making faster, better decisions because of it. You ask your developers to add this functionality, but they're already stretched maintaining the core application.
You try to hire additional resources but the only people who respond to your job ads have either the software expertise or the industry experience — never both.
There are no guarantees that your in-house team will be able to provide the customization you require — or that customization is necessarily better than a robust and proven platform built with industry standards in mind.
In-house software development seems to offer you more control over your data — which in turn suggests security.
The reality is that connecting your software to a variety of wind turbines is surprisingly complex. Every connection between your fleet, your network, and your servers presents vulnerabilities. Without the experience of interfacing with renewable energy hardware, you may find that your data ends up vulnerable to hackers and snoopers.
Cybersecurity incidents targeting energy infrastructure are increasing in frequency and sophistication. Renewable energy operators have become attractive targets — and the complexity of connecting hardware across distributed sites creates real exposure.
Third-party providers with established security practices carry that expertise as a baseline. Rigorous protocols, regular audits, and the operational experience of securing assets across hundreds of deployments offer a level of protection that most in-house teams can't easily replicate.
Once the software is developed and deployed, it will require regular maintenance, upgrades, and bug fixes. Managing your software will never stop, so you must always maintain a team of specialists that can keep the platform working to its full potential.
Make sure before you start that you can commit to maintaining and updating your software long-term.
Software development is notoriously difficult. Across industries, a significant share of IT projects are delivered late, over budget, missing key features — or abandoned entirely.
Renewable energy software adds layers of complexity that most development teams don't anticipate: hardware integration, data volumes, grid compliance requirements, and an industry that's still evolving rapidly. The odds of a clean delivery are not in your favor.
Your in-house software could be fraught with problems and inaccuracies — but some of its shortcomings may be difficult or impossible to identify without comparing its performance on other deployments.
Third-party software has the advantage of being tried, tested, and improved by other energy producers. In this way, you benefit from the operational experiences of your peers and competitors.
You can't hire just any developer to work on this project. You need talented people who are experienced, available, and proficient in relevant languages — and who understand the unique technical challenges of renewable energy assets.
That last requirement shrinks the pool dramatically. Finding someone with both the software expertise and the industry knowledge, at the moment you need them, is genuinely difficult.
Developing a solution for 10 wind turbines is quite different to building a platform that can manage wind, solar, and storage assets across dozens of locations. You could easily invest hundreds of thousands of dollars into building a platform that is not capable of growing with your business.
By contrast, SaaS companies are built to be able to contract and expand their capacity to meet changing demand. This absolves you of the responsibility to forecast demand and manage unexpected fluctuations; the challenge is offloaded to a specialist company.
Relying on a SaaS model to manage your renewable estate means you can face the future without fear. If your fleet grows through expansion or acquisition, you can be ready to manage the additional demand as it happens — without requiring any additional infrastructure or development resources.
How many third-party solutions will easily or automatically interface with your DIY energy software? The answer is likely very few (or none). The likely outcome is that integrations with your platform will be possible only with additional money and time spent.
Conversely, third-party solutions have already been integrated with different companies’ software and hardware, so they will connect to your core applications and services far more easily and seamlessly.
Only you know if you feel comfortable taking on these challenges. Of course, we would love you to partner with Power Factors for your asset optimization needs.
But there is more to this analysis than simple self-interest.
We have spent more than a decade building software for renewable energy companies — working through countless integrations, edge cases, and evolving industry demands so that our customers don't have to. The result is Unity, a purpose-built renewable energy management suite covering the full asset lifecycle: from local and central SCADA and EMS, to asset performance management, field service management, asset oversight, and invoice management.
Unity is trusted by 600+ customers managing assets across wind, solar, and energy storage globally. In 2026, Power Factors was ranked the #1 Energy Management System and Monitoring & Control provider by Guidehouse Research.
Whatever route you choose, we hope you're successful. But if you're evaluating your options, we'd love to show you what a proven platform looks like in practice. Get a demo.