What we learned from a botched Solar EPC tender: 5 fixes

A developer we've worked with closely ran a 60 MWp Solar EPC tender in late 2024 — well before they were on ORBID. It went badly: nine bidders invited, six dropped out mid-process, two of the three remaining bids were materially non-compliant, and the winning bid ultimately had to be renegotiated post-award after a scope dispute. Eleven months from RFP to NTP. The developer has since let us anonymise the lessons. Five fixes they put in place for the next tender, in rough order of impact.

1. Lock the scope before going to market

The original RFP had four optional scope items — module supply, MV yard, fencing, mid-life inverter replacement — each priced separately. Bidders quoted six different combinations. Comparing bids became algebra rather than evaluation. Fix: one tender, one scope, options priced as additive deltas only if there's a clear procurement reason.

2. Standardise the technical schedule

Each bidder returned their own format for technical compliance. Some PDFs, some Excel, one a 90-page Word doc. The owner's engineer spent three weeks reformatting answers before scoring could even start. Fix: the technical schedule is now a single Excel template with locked rows; bidders fill in cells, full stop.

3. Set a hard Q&A deadline

Bidder questions kept arriving up to two days before submission. The late ones got answered, the answers went out only to the bidder who asked, and at least one material clarification never reached the rest of the field. Fix: Q&A closes 14 calendar days before submission, all answers are issued to all bidders in a single addendum, no exceptions.

4. Require verifiable references upfront

Two of the six dropouts disappeared after pre-qualification because they couldn't produce the references the PQQ claimed. They'd dropped a list of past projects into the questionnaire without thinking anyone would actually check. Fix: reference letters from the project owner, signed and dated, attached to the PQQ submission. No letter, no shortlist. (ORBID does this automatically now — every reference is verified by an admin before it counts toward the bidder's MERIT score.)

5. Score on price and quality in the same room

The original tender ran a "price first, quality if there's time" process. The cheapest bid was non-compliant on three technical schedules, but by the time anyone caught it the owner was already emotionally committed to the price. Fix: combined scoring, weighted 60% technical / 40% commercial, both scored in the same meeting from the same packet of evidence.

How the second tender ran

Same developer, same scale (55 MWp), eighteen months later. Twelve invitations, eleven submissions, all eleven compliant on first pass. RFP to NTP: four months. The five fixes above are most of why.

If you'd like a template version of the technical schedule + Q&A process referenced here, we share them with developers running their first tender on ORBID — drop us a line.