March 2026 Blog | onCORE Origination
By Joseph Tassone Jr.
In business and in life, making a timely decision is often more critical than making a perfect one. The real risk is in not deciding at all.
Thoughtful analysis and due diligence are essential, especially in industries like renewable energy development, where projects involve complex technical, regulatory, and financial considerations. But there comes a point where analysis stops creating clarity and starts creating paralysis. When that happens, opportunities can disappear quickly.
In renewable development, timing is critical. Projects compete for land, interconnection, zoning, incentives, and local support. Meanwhile, landowners often speak with several developers, utilities update queues, and municipalities revise zoning codes. Few opportunities wait while teams debate every variable.
The most successful developers understand this tradeoff. They gather information, trust their experienced teams and consultants, and make decisions. If you involve the right people and follow a disciplined process, most decisions are correct and the rest can usually be fixed.
What is much harder to fix is lost time.
Over the years, I’ve come to believe there are two types of mistakes in development: active and passive.
Active mistakes happen when you move forward aggressively and occasionally make the wrong call. Maybe you underestimated a cost or chose a site configuration that later needs to be adjusted. These things happen when projects move quickly, and in most cases, they can be corrected.
Passive mistakes are different. These occur when teams fail to act, like missing filing deadlines, delaying decisions, or letting opportunities slip away while waiting for perfect information.
The interesting thing is that we tend to focus on the active mistakes because they are more tangible. But the reality is active mistakes are typically correctable, or at least can be a learning experience and avoid repeating. Meanwhile, passive mistakes often go unnoticed or undervalued, leading to repeated mistakes. And the thing about passive mistakes is that they are often uncorrectable – once an opportunity is gone, it’s typically gone for good.
To illustrate this, let me share an example from several years ago:
We were developing a community solar project in upstate New York and were preparing our Special Use Permit application for the town. The project was largely ready to go, but the team got stuck debating where exactly to bring the access road into the property.
It wasn’t a complicated decision, but the discussion dragged on. For about a week the team went back and forth analyzing different approaches.
The day before we were finally going to submit the application, the town enacted a moratorium on solar projects.
The moratorium stated that any submitted or pending application would be grandfathered. But our delay over a minor access issue meant we were not. We had to wait nine months for the moratorium to end before submitting to the planning board and nearly lost the project entirely.
That experience reinforced a lesson I’ve seen repeatedly in this industry: perfect decisions rarely matter as much as timely decisions.
We see a similar dynamic when negotiating early commercial terms on projects. Teams can spend weeks debating relatively small financial details before executing a land agreement. Of course, it’s important to maintain discipline around project economics. Developers must stay within budget and negotiate fair lease terms with property owners. But in extremely competitive markets, waiting too long to finalize a deal can cost far more than a small increase in rent or purchase price.
Last year, we secured a property for a battery energy storage project in a very competitive market. The landowner was a sophisticated real estate developer and requested an additional $2 per square foot in annual rent, roughly $20,000 per year more than originally proposed.Our customer took too long to review the economics and rerun the model before moving forward and the customer threatened to walk. Given that ultimatum, the customer fortunately decided to execute the lease. Nine months later, the utility interconnection results came back with upgrade costs roughly 50 percent below what similar projects in that region typically see. The savings from the favorable interconnection outcome completely overshadowed the modest increase in annual rent and the project was a homerun – but we almost lost it over $2 per sq. ft.
This highlights another core truth in development: many key financial variables are unknown early.
Interconnection results, equipment pricing, incentive structures, financing terms, and market conditions can all change significantly over the life of a project. Waiting for perfect clarity before making early-stage decisions is rarely possible.
The best developers I’ve worked with share a common trait: they gather available information, rely on experienced teams, make thoughtful decisions, and move forward in a timely and decisive manner.
Not every decision will be perfect. But momentum matters. Projects progress through decisions made under uncertainty. That is development.
In the end, the worst decision is indecision.
Joe Tassone Jr. is the founder and a principal of onCORE Origination with 30 years of project development experience and an expert in renewable energy development. Visit www.oncoreorig.com for more information.