After years of paying more for less, renewable energy owners are finding the tables have turned.
A market that spent the better part of a decade hardening has flipped into a rapid softening, and buyers now hold negotiating power they haven't had since the late 2010s, according to George Fine (pictured), partner - renewables, power and energy at McGill and Partners.
"We're in a heavily softening market right now, and insurer appetite is stronger than it has been in seven or eight years," Fine told Insurance Business. Double-digit rate reductions are now common, he said, often "with relatively little effort."
The appetite is being fed by a sector still expanding at pace despite a less supportive policy backdrop in Washington. Solar and battery storage are projected to make up roughly 81% of new US utility-scale generating capacity in 2025, with about 32.5 GW of solar and 18 GW or more of battery storage expected to come online, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).
At the same time, the EIA reported that battery storage capacity grew about 59% in the 12 months to late 2025, while an SEIA/Benchmark Mineral Intelligence report put 2025 additions at a record 57.6 GWh.
For Fine, that growth underpins the insurance opportunity regardless of federal incentives. "Economically, wind, solar, and battery storage have never been more commercially viable than they are today," he said.
Battery storage stands out in particular, Fine noted, as compact assets that provide grid-balancing services with a strong standalone business case.
The standout peril remains natural catastrophe — and for solar, hail above all. An AXIS Capital analysis of five years of claims found hail accounted for about 55% of the total gross amount of solar nat-cat and extreme-weather claims in North America, despite representing only around 1% of filed claims. The broader peril is growing too, with US insured losses from severe convective storms exceeding $50 billion in both 2023 and 2024.
Rather than abandoning exposed states, Fine said, insurers are managing their participation through structure and rewarding resilience, such as hail-stow protocols that tilt tracker-mounted panels to a steep angle as storms approach.
"I don't think many insurers would say today, 'We don't write solar in Texas,'" he said. "Instead, they would say, 'We'll write it, but we need a certain deductible or sublimit in place.'"
The hard market left its mark on terms. A solar farm deductible that once sat at $25,000 might now be $250,000, Fine said; the legacy of years in which clients were "paying more for less coverage." His advice is to use the current leverage strategically rather than chasing premium alone.
"Now is an opportunity for them to identify their biggest pain points and address them," he said, whether that means higher limits, lower retentions, broader wording, or premium relief. "Because insurer appetite is so strong, clients have more negotiating power than they've had in a long time."
He cautioned that the pace will not last indefinitely. With few full cycles behind it, the renewable insurance market is hard to call, but Fine expects rate cuts to slow and competition to migrate toward structure, through "higher limits, lower deductibles, or broader terms and conditions,” rather than price.
McGill is targeting an underserved corner of that market through its digital Underscore platform, with a product aimed at smaller asset owners who have historically paid disproportionately high rates because of minimum-premium requirements.
Looking forward, some emerging risks may prove more important for the growth of this sector.
Cyber exposure through the SCADA systems that remotely monitor and control large portfolios is a genuine vulnerability, but Fine said this has not yet produced major client losses, and the distributed nature of renewable generation limits the business-interruption contagion that worries some buyers.
“We still recommend that clients purchase cyber coverage and think seriously about the exposure, but the primary focus remains property damage and business interruption risks,” he said.
Fine’s larger concern is a single point of failure higher up the chain: a cyber event hitting a major turbine manufacturer's fleet simultaneously, which he called "a much larger problem than a single wind farm being disrupted."
Decommissioning, meanwhile, is proving less of an issue than expected. “There are environmental coverage products available, and there are specialists who focus on that area. But what we’re seeing in practice is that most developers want to repower their assets rather than abandon them,” said Fine.
“Older wind farms, for example, are often being upgraded with newer equipment rather than being decommissioned entirely. There’s still a lot of value in those sites. The industry is in a healthy place, and most owners are focused on improving the performance and efficiency of aging assets rather than shutting them down.”
