Above and Beyond: New Excess Natural Catastrophe Capacity for Renewable Energy

The renewable energy industry is always thinking in the long term. We build projects designed to operate for 30+ years, knowing they’ll face whatever weather patterns, administrations, and market conditions emerge over those decades.

Right now, that long-term thinking feels more critical than ever. Recent policy shifts and climate reports have created uncertainty, but they’ve also reinforced something we’ve always known: this industry succeeds when we build resilient infrastructure that can weather any storm—literal or figurative. 

The reality is that our projects are getting larger while extreme weather is getting more severe. A single hail event can now represent tens of millions in losses on utility-scale installations, and utilizing insurance as a risk transfer mechanism is now more critical than ever. When traditional insurance markets began to pull back from renewables, leaving coverage gaps that threatened project financing, we had a choice to either accept that constraint or find a way around it.

That’s why we’re launching Excess Natural Catastrophe coverage: up to $20 million in additional capacity, specifically designed to cover losses resulting from hail, severe convective storms, and named windstorms for solar, wind, and BESS assets. This is in addition to our excess capacity for wildfire, earthquake, and flood, which we already write. Excess layers are designed to protect a project in case it receives damages that exceed the limits of the primary layer. It’s not always going to be necessary for every site, but when hail alone accounts for an estimated 73% of total losses in the solar industry, it can provide an extra sense of security, especially in high-hazard hail and hurricane zones. 

We’re applying the same philosophy we’ve always used: resilience should be rewarded. Projects that invest in hail stow systems, quality equipment, and robust O&M protocols get better terms. We’ve developed our Hail Stow and Risk Evaluation form in partnership with VDE Americas to standardize how we assess these protective measures, creating a clear framework for recognizing and rewarding the investments that asset owners make in protecting their projects.

Launching this product is a significant milestone for kWh Analytics, and I’m grateful for our team, our carriers, and reinsurance partners who helped make this happen. Insurance should be a catalyst, not a constraint, for the growth of clean energy, and we’re proud to play a role in enabling that progress. The challenges facing renewable energy are real, but so is our commitment to building risk transfer solutions that outlasts them.

Read the Announcement: kwhanalytics.com/kwh-analytics-launches-excess-natural-catastrophe-coverage-for-the-renewable-energy-industry