Chinese, Indian and American companies have strengthened their positions atop the solar industry’s engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) rankings, due to the size and quantity of the projects present in these countries.
This is according to the latest EPC rankings table published today by PV database Wiki-Solar. The top three companies in terms of EPC capacity built – SOLV Energy, McCarthy and Eiffage – have remained on the podium from last year, but the fourth and fifth spots are now occupied by Larsen & Toubro and Sterling & Wilson, both of India.
SOLV Energy dominated new EPC additions, adding 20 new plants with a combine capacity of 3.7GW in 2024. No other company installed more than 3GW, and only three companies added more than 2GW.
Larsen & Toubro’s growth is particularly strong within the Indian market, adding four projects with a combined capacity of 1.9GW since the end of 2023, to move up three places on the rankings.
Leading European EPC firms, meanwhile, posted more moderate growth. The highest-ranking companies in terms of sheer operating capacity, France-based Eiffages and German Belectric, added just 1.5GW of new project capacity in the last 12 months; tenth and 12th-most new capacity, respectively.
European companies retain position in O&M rankings
European companies have retained a slightly larger market share in the operations and maintenance (O&M) space. Three European companies – Eiffages, Equans and juwi – are among the top five list of companies by O&M capacity, with a further four – Enerparc, BayWa r.e., Belectric and Elecnor – present in the top ten.
Looking beyond SOLV Energy, which dominates both rankings tables with around double the EPC and more than triple the O&M capacity of any other company, European players also rank highly in both lists. Eiffage, Belectric and Equans all rank in the top ten on both league tables, with Eiffages placing third on both.
Half of the top six O&M companies are based in the US. SOLV Energy added 25 plants with a combined capacity of 4.5GW, while McCarthy added four new plants with a combined capacity of 1.1GW – US firms were the only ones to add at least 1GW of new capacity.
These trends are shown in the graph above, which includes companies that are ranked in the top 30 in terms of commissioned EPC and O&M capacity; this is why companies such as the China Machinery Engineering Corporation, which boasts 2.7GW of EPC capacity but is absent from the EPC ranking, are not present.
“China, India and the US now regularly build plants at the gigawatt scale”, said Wiki-Solar founder Philip Wolfe. “The average plant size in India is over 80MW; while in the US it has risen from 15MW a decade ago to 90MW today”.
