Commercial, agricultural & municipal solar · Bessemer Flats & the Fallow Plains · Since 2009
Forty thousand square feet of south-facing steel earns nothing staring at the sky.
Ironfield builds the arrays businesses run on — ballasted racking that never touches the membrane, three-phase string inverters at 480 volts, barn trusses signed by a structural engineer before a panel ships, and a production guarantee measured at the revenue meter, where the utility reads it too. Sixty-three businesses on the register; two have expanded; none have called back angry.
The grain dryer runs in October and the array pays for it in July. Nobody at the co-op expected the electric bill to become the second-best line of the harvest.
Services
What Ironfield builds
01
Ballasted warehouse roofs
Concrete-block ballast, zero penetrations, wind-uplift calcs stamped by an engineer who signs letters for a living. The membrane warranty survives the array — we get the roofer’s sign-off in writing before the first block is placed, because the roof you have is the roof you keep.
02
Barns, shops & farm arrays
Truss capacity checked against the snow load the county actually enforces, three-phase string inverters sized to the grain dryer and the cold room, DC runs in galvanized steel because barns are where rodents go to retire. The farm meter does the arithmetic every month, in public.
03
Municipal & school roofs
Public bids written in public language: line items a clerk can read, bondable schedules, domestic content where the funding demands it. We have stood in enough council meetings to know an array has to survive three elections, not one ribbon-cutting.
04
O&M and the metered guarantee
Quarterly production reads against the model, thermographic scans of the combiners, inverter firmware kept current, and a guarantee referee nobody can argue with: the revenue meter. Production misses are settled at the tariff, not in a conference call.
The fleet, in figures
Sixteen seasons on the register
Financing, side by side
Three ways to pay for the sky
The same engineering sits under all three; the money is the only thing that moves. Every plan is quoted from the same production model, and the comparison sheet goes home with you whether you finance with us or with your own bank.
Cash purchase
$2.35 / wattinstalled, typical
- Ballasted roof or truss-signed barn array
- 30% federal credit plus depreciation, yours to file
- Production guarantee at the revenue meter
- O&M register at $0.008 / watt, monthly
- Warranty stack assigned to the building
The co-op’s 412 kW cash job pays back in 6.4 years on the current tariff — the arithmetic is in the bid packet.
Equipment lease
from 2.9% APRon the hardware, fixed
- Nothing down on structures up to 250 kW
- Fixed monthly payment, seven-year term
- $1 buyout or re-lease at term
- O&M included while the lease runs
- Tax benefits pass through where eligible
For roofs that need the array but cannot tie up the roofing-reserve cash — the payment is set against the modelled tariff offset, in writing.
Power purchase
$0.114 / kWhmetered, 20 years
- Zero capital, zero on the balance sheet
- We finance, build, own and maintain
- You buy only the kilowatt-hours you use
- Tariff-locked with a fixed escalator
- Buy-out windows at years 7 and 12
Where the board will not touch capital at all. The PPA rate is set against your actual tariff, never against a national average.
How it goes
Load study to metered guarantee
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
Weeks 1–2
The load study
Twelve months of demand data off the utility portal, the roof or truss drawings, and the tariff read line by line. The study belongs to the property whether we build or not — it names the size the meter argues for, and a smaller honest number has lost us bids we are still proud of.
Weeks 3–6
Engineering & the letters
Ballast calcs and wind uplift, the structural letter for the trusses, the single-line at 480 volts, and the interconnection application into the co-op’s queue — filed by us, tracked by us, expedited by nobody’s cousin.
Weeks 7–14
Build, commission, train
Ballast and rail set to the stamped layout, string inverters hung and labeled, commissioning tests witnessed. Your maintenance lead gets two hours on the monitoring platform and the shutdown procedure, laminated, in the plant room.
Quarterly, after
The metered guarantee
Production read against the model every quarter and trued up annually at the tariff. A miss is a credit on the invoice — no meeting, no narrative. Sixteen seasons in, the fleet runs at 98.2% and the clause has paid out three times, all three on our invoice.
2025 — 2026, the Flats and the Plains
Roofs that earn their keep
Six builds from last season, photographed at commissioning with the as-builts still clipped to the rail. Captions name the business type, because the engineering changes with it.
The structural letter travels
Ballast calcs, uplift stamps and the truss letter go in the bid packet and stay in the building file. The next engineer, the next owner and the next insurance inspector all read the same numbers we did.
The meter is the referee
The production guarantee settles at the revenue meter — the same instrument that prints your bill — at your tariff, annually. There is no friendlier arbiter and no easier one to check.
Expandable by design
Conduit sized one string larger, combiner ports left live, the single-line drawn with the addition pencilled in. Two register members have expanded; neither required a redesign, a re-permit storm or a conversation longer than a coffee.
Before the bid
Board-room questions
The five every Flats board and Plains kitchen table reaches by the second meeting. The office line answers six to five, and the engineers answer it — there is no sales floor to transfer you to.
Our roof is nineteen years old. Is it a candidate?
Sometimes, and the membrane is the judge. A roof with six honest years left can take a ballasted array with a re-roof coordination plan; a roof with two cannot, and we will say so at the load study — before you spend a dollar on engineering. Roughly one study in four ends with "re-roof first, array second," and the studies that say it are free.
How do public bids actually work with you?
Line by line, in public language: hardware, labor, engineering, interconnection, O&M priced separately so the clerk can compare apples. We have won bids on being readable and lost them on being honest about schedule; both feel correct. Domestic content requirements are met where the funding demands it and flagged where it does not.
Why string inverters instead of the residential kind?
At 480 volts three-phase, a commercial string inverter is the honest tool: fewer parts per watt, serviceable from the ground, and its failure is an event the monitoring platform names in an email rather than a roof walk with a thermal camera. Microinverters earn their keep on complicated shade at residential scale; on a big unshaded plane they are forty small replacements waiting to be forty small invoices.
What is the co-op interconnection queue really like?
Slow in the spring, slower after a storm season, and perfectly survivable when the application is right the first time. We file complete — single-line, protection settings, the stamped calcs — and we track it weekly. The queue has never cost a customer a commissioning date that was in the contract, because the contract dates start after the queue, not during it.
What happens to the array if we expand the building?
It grows, on purpose. Conduit and combiners are sized one string larger, and the single-line arrives with the addition pencilled in. The two register members who expanded added capacity inside a fortnight each — no redesign, no re-permit of the existing sections, and the guarantee simply re-baselines on the new model.
Free load studies across the Flats & the Fallow Plains · (555) 027-9032 · bids@ironfieldsolar.example
Free, and yours either way
Start with the load study
Send the address and a utility login or twelve months of bills. The study names the size the meter argues for, the finance comparison comes with it, and the bid packet follows in plain language your board can read aloud. bids@ironfieldsolar.example