Land Origination creates opportunities. Site Control creates value.
June 2026 Blog
By Joe Tassone Jr.
Most companies track revenue, costs, and metrics with precision. They know what they spend on staff, consultants, permits, studies, and legal fees. One major cost never appears on the P&L: opportunity cost. For developers in solar, battery storage, and data centers, the value of opportunities that were never pursued or never reached site control can be substantial.
The problem usually isn’t talent. Most teams hire skilled originators who know their markets, their tools, and what makes a good site. The problem is that originators are often spread too thin. They are often tasked with building the top of the funnel, converting deals and sometimes even managing existing development pipeline. Each one of these activities is a job in itself. Origination is a zero-sum game: every hour spent managing an existing project is an hour not spent creating the next one.
When project managers, developers, and originators are asked to both run projects and source new ones, prospecting inevitably slips. An hour spent on the phone with a landowner is an hour of cold calls lost. A day spent on an application deadline is a day of follow up with active leads lost. Over time, those delays and lost efforts compound and in a year, a developer could have missed out on a handful of projects that would have delivered millions in value to the company.
Prospecting has also gotten harder. Most property owners have already been contacted, many of them repeatedly. Those who haven’t may be harder to find or resistant. Gone are the days of being able to rely solely on mailers to build pipeline. Winning a site takes a comprehensive approach, persistence and building real trust with the landowner. That amount of attention and effort requires significant resources and bandwidth.
And not every prospect becomes a project. Many don’t. A promising site gets found, outreach works, momentum builds – and then for one reason or another the deal dies. Months of effort can vanish. Failure is part of development, and every company accepts that risk. The real question is are you capturing as many potential opportunities as possible?
The stakes are real. A distributed-generation project can be worth millions; a utility-scale project even more. Opportunities are lost when origination teams are spread too thin.
This is the case for treating origination as a dedicated function rather than a task squeezed between competing priorities. The most successful development organizations recognize this. If missed opportunities showed up on a P&L, their scale would be impossible to ignore. The difficulty is that they’re invisible on a spreadsheet.
For teams that value missed opportunities, a proper allocation of origination resources is one of the simplest ways to keep good opportunities from quietly slipping away. At onCORE, we’re built to ensure that generating new opportunities, closing deals and advancing projects are not mutually exclusive. We do so through a comprehensive approach that augments our clients’ internal efforts, protects their bandwidth and leaves no stone unturned and no landowner overlooked.
Joe Tassone Jr. is the founder and a principal of onCORE Origination, with 30 years of project development experience and expertise in renewable energy development. Visit www.oncoreorig.com for more information.