A perspective from our Principal and Founder on uncovering a critical market gap in 2012, building a specialized brokerage dedicated to renewables, and our growth journey since.
It started with a workers’ comp claim
My first exposure to a renewable energy account occurred in 2012 while I was employed at a mid-market commercial brokerage. It involved a wind O&M contractor facing a critical situation after an employee suffered a near-fatal workplace injury. The contractor required comprehensive support to navigate their workers’ compensation program.
That specific account shared no similarities with the rest of my portfolio. The primary exposure stemmed from technicians ascending towers situated in isolated regions under severe weather conditions. Every element—from the specific class codes and distinct claim dynamics to the profound impact a solitary catastrophic injury has on the experience modification rate of a mid-sized contractor—failed to correspond with the standard manufacturing and distribution clients I handled on a daily basis.
Once the placement was finalized, my curiosity was piqued. I began shifting my focus toward developers and asset owners, and as I explored further, a single realization became increasingly obvious.
The industry was compounding. Its insurance representation wasn’t.
Back then, developers essentially faced a choice between two paths.
The first option consisted of a few energy brokers who, having established their core expertise in traditional sectors like oil, gas, and conventional power, were just beginning to branch out into the renewable sector.
The second, far more common, was a generalist. A capable broker at a capable firm with one or two renewable accounts sitting alongside restaurants, real estate, car dealerships, and any number of other verticals. That broker wasn’t negligent. They were solving a different problem every hour of the day, and renewables were one line item in a book that rewarded breadth over depth.
Meanwhile project sizes grew, capital structures grew more complex, and tax equity and debt brought insurance requirements that were increasingly specific and increasingly unforgiving. The gap between what developers needed and what the brokerage community was built to deliver widened every year.
My thesis was simple. A brokerage that dedicated all of its resources to renewables specialization, across staff, products, services, and placement strategy, would resonate immediately with this industry. Not a practice group inside a generalist firm. Not a vertical on a website. The whole firm.
This is why in 2018 I left my brokerage amicably to launch Renewable Guard, with the goal of giving the industry a fully dedicated renewable energy brokerage built to support how fast it was growing.
The generalist trap
The failure mode of a big box brokerage isn’t malice. It’s structure.
When a generalist firm juggles clients across dozens of industries, it struggles to build the technical depth necessary for navigating renewables-specific underwriting and complex project finance requirements. Cultivating that specialized expertise requires a level of focus that a broad-market approach simply cannot sustain.
These shortcomings manifest in distinct, predictable ways: submissions that fail to convey the critical narrative underwriters require; programs initialed with aggressive, underpriced terms just to secure the business, only to face steep hikes during renewal when the broker fails to advocate successfully to markets that never fully grasped the risk profile; and coverage structures that merely fulfill a lender’s baseline compliance checklist without evaluating whether they would truly trigger in the event of a severe convective hailstorm, tracker mechanical issues, a delayed commercial operation date (COD), or extended supply chain backlogs for machinery facing long lead times.
Operational efficiency is another area directly impacted by this dynamic. Because timing is paramount for a developer, the combination of bureaucratic hurdles and a shortage of specialized talent frequently leads to overlooked eleventh-hour adjustments and missed closing schedules—an issue we have personally observed when inheriting troubled accounts.
Why independence is part of the thesis
We built Renewable Guard as a 100% independent brokerage, and that was deliberate.
Independence means no carrier ownership stake steering where business lands, no volume commitments dictating which markets see a submission, and no conflicting book of business pulling in another direction. When we take a program to market, the strategy is built around the client’s risk and the client’s capital stack. Full stop.
A developer already manages lenders, tax equity investors, off-takers, and EPCs, each with incentives different from yours. Your broker shouldn’t be one more.
What specialization actually produces
Focus compounds. When every person in the building works on the same asset class, you stop re-explaining the fundamentals and start building things that don’t exist anywhere else.
Concierge Insurance Services. A dedicated project finance team working directly with lenders so projects close on schedule, because in this business a program that’s technically correct and two days late is a failure.
The Insurance Scorecard. A benchmarking tool built on real industry policy data that scores a developer’s program against the market and surfaces the gaps incumbent brokers routinely miss.
XS CAT PML Strategy. Rates fluctuate as the market shifts between hard and soft. To focus only on rate is to miss the point. The silent killer is managing CAT insurance premiums for scaling portfolios. Renewable Guard has innovated four specific strategies for managing CAT that reduce or eliminate the need to purchase additional CAT insurance when stacking MWs and GWs onto a portfolio, achieving significant savings well beyond what soft market rate reduction delivers.
Parametric Hail Solutions. Balance sheet protection built for a property market that has repriced severe convective storm risk aggressively, and where traditional deductible structures increasingly leave developers carrying more than they realize.
RG Smart SOV. Real time benchmarking against a database of 165,000+ projects, addressing overinflated FMV and giving clients the same valuation precision on the insurance side that their finance teams already demand everywhere else.
None of these came from a strategy offsite. They came from seeing the same problem enough times to justify building the answer.
What the market taught us
The thesis held. Specialization resonated, and it has allowed Renewable Guard to take real market share in a space that was, not long ago, an afterthought on someone else’s account list. Today we’re one of the largest 100% independent renewable energy brokers in the U.S. based on GWs managed.
But the more useful lesson is what specialization buys when conditions get hard, and they have. Severe convective storm losses reshaped how property markets view solar. Hail deductibles moved. Sublimits appeared where none had been. Capacity tightened, then repriced, then became selective in ways that rewarded well prepared submissions and punished sloppy ones.
In a soft market, almost anyone can get a renewable account placed. In a differentiated market, the difference between a broker who knows this asset class and one who doesn’t shows up directly in your pro forma: in premium, in deductible, in whether a lender’s requirement can be satisfied at all.
What to ask your broker
Renewable energy isn’t a category to be managed alongside forty others. It’s a specialized industry that rewards people who understand every phase of the project lifecycle.
So the question isn’t whether your broker can place your program. It’s how many of these they place, which markets take their calls, what they know about how these assets actually fail, and whose interests they’re representing when the recommendation is made.
We started Renewable Guard because this industry deserved a firm that could answer all four without hesitating.
Renewable Guard is one of the largest 100% independent renewable energy insurance brokerages in the United States based on GWs managed, serving developers, asset owners, contractors, and operators across solar, wind, and storage. Contact us to schedule a call.
