An Insider's Guide to
Best practices for risk analysis and risk mitigation to ensure transaction closing.
Forty percent of M&A deals fail, most of them on details found at closing. This book is about finding them first.
Cover design — subject to change
Try it
This is what Schedule B looks like on a real utility-scale deal. Every line is routine. Every line is also where a project has died. Tap one to see what an experienced land team reads into it.
Tap any exception below.
What a land team sees
A blanket easement. It burdens the entire parcel because nobody ever fixed its location on the ground. You cannot site a substation, a collector run, or a transmission corridor with confidence until the county agrees to an exhibit that pins it down. Until then, your title insurer prices this as a risk across every acre, and your engineer is designing around a line that could be anywhere.
Chapter Two · Chapter SevenWhat a land team sees
The minerals were severed a century ago, so this property now has two chains of title and you have only searched one. In most jurisdictions the mineral estate is dominant — the owner can come to the surface. Order a Mineral Ownership Report immediately; tracing 1921 heirs can take months, and the answer determines whether you need surface waivers, subordinations, or a redesign.
Chapter FourWhat a land team sees
The quietest line on the page. It usually means a farming or grazing tenant with an unrecorded lease, and those tenants have real rights. Some states set a statutory date by which notice must be given to terminate — miss it and your construction start slides a full season. The landowner knows who is on the ground. Ask them, and put it in writing.
Chapter Two · Chapter SevenWhat a land team sees
If the life tenant has not signed the lease, the lease is incomplete and it is not insurable — no matter how many other signatures you collected. This is the classic one: the deal reaches financing, someone reads the vesting deed properly, and the life tenant now has every reason to renegotiate. Worse, if she passes before signing, her remaindermen inherit and you are in probate.
Chapter Three · Chapter SevenWhat a land team sees
The road was never built and the area never developed the way anyone expected — but the right survives in the record, and the proposed alignment may run straight through your site. No insurer will drop the exception without written confirmation from the municipality that it does not intend to build. That letter moves at municipal speed, which is to say months. Start it early or it becomes the thing holding up the wire.
Chapter TwoWhat a land team sees
The standard survey exception — boilerplate, and the reason lenders insist on a full ALTA survey with the Table A items specified up front. Until it is removed, everything a survey would have caught stays your problem: the fence across the boundary, the irrigation ditch nobody recorded, the access route that turns out not to be insurable. Cheap survey products push this risk downstream into closing, where it costs far more.
Chapter Two · Chapter FiveIllustrative example composed from the book's case studies. Not an actual title commitment, and not legal advice.
“What she has written here is not a theoretical framework. It is a field guide.”
Jigar Shah Co-founder, SunEdison · Former Director, Loan Programs Office, U.S. Department of Energy · From the foreword
Every megawatt sits on ground someone else owns. Behind the model and the term sheet are leases, easements, mineral reservations, access gaps and survey exceptions — and any one of them can stall a closing or quietly erode the value of a portfolio long after it changes hands.
Kimberlee Centera has spent more than thirty-five years on the diligence side of these transactions, leading the land and title work behind utility-scale wind, solar, storage and transmission projects. This is the book she wishes existed: a transaction-by-transaction walkthrough of where deals actually break, and what experienced teams do about it before closing.
From the book
Every one of these is a real transaction, anonymised. None of them failed on price.
Fallbrook, California · Storage
Chapter Two
Virginia · Battery storage
Chapter Two
Texas · BESS
Chapter Four
Lease amendment · Closing week
Chapter Three
Wyoming · Site review
Chapter Six
California · Title claim
Chapter Nine
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What the book covers
Not a theoretical framework. A field guide built from real transactions, anonymised case studies, and the questions that should have been asked earlier.
How to prioritise critical-path parcels, audit a data room, and structure a sixty-day review so problems appear while there is still leverage to fix them.
Commitments, exceptions, ALTA surveys and Table A items — what an underwriter is actually looking for, and which exceptions quietly become financing blockers.
Life estates, trusts, undivided interests, powers of attorney, and the missing signature that renders a lease unenforceable at the worst possible moment.
What to fix, what to insure, and what to walk away from — including an A/B/C framework for triaging defects against a financing calendar.
Why a severance creates two chains of title, when to order a Mineral Ownership Report, and how dormant versus producing rights change the mitigation strategy entirely.
Unified closing protocols, title-risk reserves, tax equity readiness, and the transition from transaction team to construction team without losing the thread.
Table of contents
Opening with a foreword from Jigar Shah, then moving from market context through land control, ownership, minerals, environment, valuation and project finance.
Who it's for
Read it before you acquire a project whose previous developer's work you don't fully understand.
The quality of the underlying asset determines the quality of every instrument built on top of it.
A shared vocabulary for curative work, survey coordination and underwriting conversations.
Where the legal edge cases actually show up in practice, and how they get resolved before closing.
About the author
With contributions from
Before it's published
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Questions
The manuscript is complete and the book is in production. We're not announcing a date until it's confirmed — sign up and you'll hear it first.
Print and digital. Format and retailer details will be confirmed closer to publication and shared with the list.
The case studies come from utility-scale wind, solar, storage and transmission, but the disciplines — land control, ownership verification, title curative, mineral risk, valuation and closing mechanics — apply across power and energy project development, including data center and load-driven projects.
Yes. Tell us when you sign up and we'll come back to you with bulk options once pricing is set.
She does, regularly. Flag it on the form or contact TerraPro Solutions directly and we'll route it to the right person.
No. The book is for informational and educational purposes and reflects professional experience and general industry practice. Laws, title practices and underwriting standards vary by jurisdiction — consult qualified counsel and licensed professionals on any specific transaction.
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