"...no answers for me, just nothing"

Another cautionary tale to take note of…

This one right here in our home- Arizona.

A recent article showcased the story of an Arizona based solar company and its customers.

“N4T Investigators: Customers of closed solar company still waiting for finished work”

https://www.kvoa.com/news/n4t-investigators-customers-of-closed-solar-company-still-waiting-for-finished-work/article_b9e14c6e-d8be-11ed-a281-b7d01ab08177.html

I’ll let you read the article, but paraphrased:

Looks like a local (Arizona) solar company was started and was doing installs but for whatever reason went out of business leaving several customers with partially installed systems that didn’t work.

The details about why the company closed down isn’t clear- but it doesn’t matter much if it was inadequate management, negligence, or outright fraud. The end result is the same for the customers.

And that is what we might want to highlight as a lesson from this.

In most cases, there are several aspects to what we might call a ‘solar company’. Broadly speaking, we can maybe break it down into:

• Engineering/Procurement/Construction (EPC)
• Sales
• Marketing
• Finance
• Operations
• Customer care

And probably more divisions/department/etc…

The point here is these might actually be different companies that are contracting each other or have agreements to offer each other’s services.

So, that guy knocking on your door and selling you a solar power system for your home, in most cases, probably works for a company that does not have a finance department.

Instead, that company probably has a few or more finance providers that they work with. Kind of like at an auto dealer- they have their own ‘preferred’ lenders or you can ‘bring you own’.

This distinction is important…

When a customer signs an agreement with a solar company to install a solar power system, the loan agreement is (usually) directly between the customer and the finance company who did the loan.

If there is a problem with the solar power system, the finance company (generally) doesn’t have a dog in that fight. Much the same way when we buy a car with a loan from our own bank and the car breaks down- the bank isn’t really at fault.

So it extends from there that if a solar company fails to deliver on their promises and the customer is unhappy- the customer can find themselves in a weird position like those in this article where they owe payments on a loan agreement where the money from that loan was paid to a solar company that went out of business before finishing the solar power system.

Not a good place to be.

In this case, the article shares that maybe one or more of the finance companies has stepped up to help the customers by pausing the payments temporarily- which I find is a good gesture, because the finance company did what they were supposed to do and aren’t really at fault.

That said, I think there is an element in this equation where the banks/finance companies have at least a little responsibility in providing some sort of basic validation of a solar company they would support with loans.

More-

Maybe there should be certain points a solar company must show before the bank would release payments. Like maybe a percentage released upon permit approval, engineering approval, physical install on location, and final commissioning.

It wouldn’t hurt my feelings to see a system must be running for a full billing cycle and all data from the software running the system to be submitted to get the last (large) chunk of the payment.

Anyways, we can’t eliminate exposure to the issues that appear to have happened in this article. All we can do is educate ourselves and minimize the risks.

If you are looking into rooftop solar and would like to stack the odds in your favor, my upcoming book Tucson Solar Insider Desk Guide for Buying Solar might do the trick. Click here to get notified when it is released

Be Good!

Curtis