1.2 GW utility solar
Helia Solar goes bankable
Helia’s 1.2 GW solar portfolio needed performance evidence its lenders would accept without a third-party audit. String-level measurement, reconciled against irradiance, gave them a record that speaks for itself.
Result 01
1.2 GW
Portfolio under string-level measurement across eleven plants.
Result 02
€0
Spent on third-party performance audits for the latest build-out financing.
Result 03
0.4%
Tolerance between metered output and modelled irradiance, sustained portfolio-wide.
The challenge
Every financing round for Helia’s next plant began with the same request: an independent performance audit of the plants already running. Each audit took months, cost a six-figure sum and produced a report that was out of date the day it was signed.
The underlying data existed, but it lived in inverter logs and monthly exports that nobody outside Helia could verify.
What we did
Zephyra instrumented all eleven plants at the inverter, reading every string at 15-minute resolution alongside plane-of-array irradiance and module temperature. Readings were reconciled against each plant’s performance model in the same interval and committed, signed, to the ledger.
Helia’s lenders were given read-only access to the same record — performance ratio, availability and curtailment history for every plant, updating every quarter of an hour.
The outcome
The next financing closed without a third-party audit. Lenders took the ledger as the performance evidence, and the covenant reporting that used to take a quarter now takes a link. Two plants also surfaced string-level under-performance that the monthly exports had smoothed away, worth roughly 1.1% of annual output.
“
“Our lenders stopped asking for extra assurance the moment we handed them Zephyra’s ledger. Independent, timestamped, instrument-level evidence changed the whole financing conversation for our next build-out.”
Mateo Ferrán
Head of Asset Performance, Helia
