Not the company I want to be stuck in a 20-year contract with.
A few years later solar prices came down and we made a purchase with an installer whose main business was purchase, not lease.
edit: I responded below, but my complaint isn't with their price -- it's their scare tactics and fuzzy break even financial calculations assuming wild rate increases. We went with a vendor who was more open and honest about the break even calcs.
This is how unchecked capitalism looks like. How can this be legal? How is it that so many companies (Google, Sun Run...) are able to get away with forcing their employees and customers to sign away their rights like this? This is in addition to the fact that even if someone has the balls to sue Google and others, it would take massive resources, so most people aren't going to sue in the first place.
Is it this bad in other western countries? or is it just the U.S?
The TPO systems as described are a boon to PG&E who, if you can believe their actions, is really concerned that people will just drop off the grid altogether.
It is.
It just looks to the east where nearly all of the largest commercial energy consumers in Nevada have dumped NV Energy and built their own solar farms to save money.
Just yesterday, there was a front-page post here about the top pricing experiments you can run, full of neat behavioral psychology tricks like decoy pricing and anchoring.
Our industry does the same emotional manipulation... we just call it "growth hacking" instead of "sales scripts".
What you're talking about is better connecting with a customer's needs and promoting the product's benefits. There's no losers in that situation, just a customer with more facts of which to make their decision.
What that training manual is describing is exploiting someone's primal fears to manipulate them into something they wouldn't have otherwise done: apples and oranges.
A better analogy might be those beauty ads that call the customer ugly then offer their product as a solution. Seems both that and the Sunrun technique rely on primal fears and worries to get sales.
edit: I think this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19133394
For example if they decide that the system needs to be bought for 20k when the house gets sold, then when you want to sell your house you just bump the price 20k to account for the panels buyout.
There, no lien to the home, and no confusion from the buyers thinking they get a house with solar panels when they're just getting a house where somebody else's panels are installed.
A corollary is that they are your family. That's my favorite red flag: some employer or vendor or other non-family entity tries to tell me I'm part of their family. Uh, no, I'm not.
That SunRun included that in their sales manual just indicates that they were addressing a sales force that was significantly staffed with sales novices who didn't already understand that, not that they were particularly nefarious.
No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves (or solves better than their current solution). But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear--let alone pain and fear that is a perception created by a sales pitch that has no qualms about playing fast and loose with the truth.
Yes, and the implication of "caveat emptor" is to take a very dim view of the ethics of folks who pitch in this way.
It is much easier to influence a decision by catering to emotions instead of reasoning.
An interesting irony struck me while reading your post that many of those potential customers are stuck with PG&E, which has to completely suck. No wonder they focus on sowing distrust.
As opposed to... your electrical utility?! Do people not remember the electricity crisis? It was an enormous, deliberately engineered market fixing scam that produced widespread power outages and a $40B windfall for the power producers financed by emergency state spending. Yet it was totally legal because they managed to get their lobbyists to fool the legislature into writing it into the law before pulling the trigger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Seriously: I'm sure Sunrun is scummy. But... come on.
Essentially it sounds like Sunrun's investors are paying to install solar panels on your house so they can claim the tax credit to offset their own income. Meanwhile you are paying Sunrun for the electricity generated by the solar panels.
There doesn't seem to be much benefit for the homeowner. You're better off buying the system up front if possible or even financing it and claiming the tax credit yourself. Then you'd only have to pay the utility for the electricity you don't generate.
"The American way" anymore seems to be to take a good idea, overcomplicate it with financial engineering, and funnel the profits to a small minority of people who actually understand what's going on.
The article calls these TPO's, but in the industry the more common term is PPA's -- Power Purchase Agreements. That's more how large solar farms work -- they find a buyer willing to pay a fixed price over 20 years and use that contract to raise money in the capital markets. Sunrun kinda took that model and applied it residential, because that's what the financial industry that could supply the capital knew.
Now that we're a few more years into this grand energy transition, PPA's are falling out of favor. Now that the capital markets see this home solar thing is more or less as reliable as promised, has expected depreciation, etc., personal loans are becoming the more common way of buying home solar.
You're better off buying the system up front if possible
Buying is all very well if you're sure to stay in the same place for 10+ years - but if you move in that time, better hope you place a high value on feeling you've helped the environment.
Not that having a mandatory loan you try to get prospective buyers to pay for is a better decision, of course...
If that's true, then your strategy should be to buy a house with solar already installed and paid for. You'd get the house at regular prices, but pay much less for electricity.
On some sunny winter days we turn off central heating and use the free electricity.
Solar panels in this type of deal are debt incurred by the home owner so the cost should be deducted from the sale price. In other words, do not buy a house with mortgaged solar panels.
We had something similar show up in my Houston suburb.
I read the gist of it and tossed it in the trash. If I want solar panels, I will pay outright, or borrow as needed to install the system.
Why in the heck should I enter into a contract to park someone else's assets onto my own property, to pay for the privilege, and to risk a massive penalty to get out of the contract, a penalty likely linked to an inflated valuation on aging panels, and on expensive installation carried out by someone with every incentive to maximize the cost.
Hahahahaahahaha! No thanks!
They're probably also factoring those arrays into their green initiatives by claiming those green credits to offset their own consumption.
Also keep in mind that these are people with very, very low electric bills - a small home in a Mediterranean climate, no need for either heat or A/C. Solar is really overkill for them. For a family with a bigger house and higher electricity usage (maybe an EV in the driveway?) there would be plenty of room for both Sunrun and the homeowner to come out ahead.
Up front means no one is responsible for maintenance except you.
As for the tax credit, you do get it in the form of a discounted price. Over here, that's how all the solar companies pitch it. They'll install it for cheap, but the condition is that you pay them a big fraction of the tax credit the following 2 years. They make it clear that the reason they're giving you the panels at below market cost is so that you can pay them in tax credits that you file for and receive.
Ok? That is standard practice when you own a home. You are responsible for all the maintenance on your home. What is scary about solar panel maintenance? I assume they have to be cleaned every so often. Anything else? Maybe you have an electrician come and retorque the connections once a year? It's not like they have a lot of moving parts assuming it's not doing anything fancy like sun-tracking.
I guess they won't come over and wash my panels for me, but, no kidding.
If I could do it again I'd get a house without TPO panels. If for nothing else, just one less variable and thing to consider. You can always get panels later.
But I gotta say, SolarCity themselves were an absolute nightmare to work with. The person who got the panel deal on our house (two owners ago), has two other panel deals with SolarCity on two other houses. When we took over the lease SolarCity basically just munged all of the account details together. A major red flag went off when they asked if I'd like to pay my bill with my Wells Fargo account. I don't have a Wells Fargo account. For over a year I had to fight these morons to get everything squared away and to finally get my account onto their online portal so I could pay online. Every single month they tried to either charge me for the other systems, or have the other guy pay for ours, and with each other's bank accounts. They told me to not make any payments until this was resolved, but also told me they'd send me to collections for non-payment. It was an absolute nightmare. Don't ever work with SolarCity.
We didn't get exactly the rig we wanted. As a typical HN reader, I learned more about solar than their customer-facing staff, and had to periodically be put on the phone with a techie they usually insulate from customers. One problem was working around a revered shade tree we had no intention of hacking to optimize solar yield in late afternoon. One shaded array in a string is like one bad battery in a flashlight; that string's output crashes. I determined that we wanted two strings on independent converters, so half the panels would be unaffected. I was willing to pay whatever this cost, but they wanted a simple pricing model. They agreed to my request. Studying the wiring after installation, it was clear that the strings couldn't possibly be independent. It took calls to Germany to understand that the converter algorithm was tuned to "fake" two independent strings, like someone learning to walk with a lame leg. As spelled out in the manufacturer manuals, the algorithms claimed to optimize for the better string, even though they only saw the combined output. They lied about what they were actually installing, or more likely, the customer-facing staff were too ignorant to understand the swap being made without my consent.
There was a full-court crush to get our contract signed by the end of the year, ostensibly to have a chance on a limited number of expiring state-sponsored favorable time-of-day rate plans with PG&E. The state office was swamped with a backlog of unprocessed requests, though it strained credulity that SolarCity wouldn't have some idea about our chances. Of course they knew we had no chance; I found out through a back channel that they never filed until January 7th, making us ineligible. This deception speaks for itself.
Our panels cover various roof vents. This is not allowed by code in many locales. One day, a plumber snaking our bathroom sink drain gave up on the new snake his boss was making him use, and said he'd just go up to the roof and snake from there. (This is standard drain geometry in a house.) He came back down mortified: Our panels were blocking his access. He managed with a different snake, then we discovered the cause for his mortification: Our solar was out as of his visit. His original snake had gone up, not down, and shorted a panel. The panel was fine, but some component near the regulator on the side of the house had literally exploded.
SolarCity repaired this promptly, without charge.
AC systems have micro-inverters for each panel or panel cluster, so DC is never transmitted over large distances or at high voltage. Because each panel is independent, shading only affects the output of the shaded panel. You can also replace damaged panels or add to the system later without having to match the characteristics of the existing panels.
2. Always get at least three quotes, using energysage: https://www.energysage.com
3. As a residential customer, never sign a PPA. Either pay cash or get a loan
4. Tesla solar customer service is wildly inconsistent. Even as a Tesla investor, I do not recommend them for solar.
Sorry for your poor Solar City experience.
Let's say you have room to mount sixteen, 2.0x1.0 meter size (72-cell) panels.
320W (cheap panels) x 16 = 5120W STC rating
370W (more expensive panels) x 16 = 5920W STC rating.
In the above i'm comparing cheap polycrystalline panels from a not-very-big Chinese maker to a well known manufacturer using high quality 156mm monocrystalline cells from a reputable cell manufacturer.
Edit: Others in the same thread have pointed out there can be aesthetic considerations as well, a cheap panel will look like this:
http://energyinformative.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/sola...
A panel built from 72 x 156mm mono, black cells will look more like:
http://www.cirelectric.com/content/images/TouSilevoPanel.jpg
This can be a big monthly and yearly kWh-fed-back-into-grid difference.
Now, "super premium" panels will be a lot more expensive, like Sunpower, which might have a STC W per sq meter rating even higher (390W in the same space), but you'd be paying literally double per panel.
Probably the most interesting part of the whole process was paying nearly 10k dollars through PayPal. That was something interesting.
Furnaces, air conditioners, water heaters, and water softeners are all often installed on contract.
The realtor sounds extremely negligent to not correctly inform the buyer about the true situation until after offer is made. That should be a flag. Realtors understand loss aversion and that you can get very fixated on a particular house. Better to get you to start thinking the house will be yours then break the bad news to you. People just don't buy houses often enough, and they get too emotionally attached, to make rational decisions. Listen to the author talk about how this is the place where he might raise a child. That sounds so portentous, but really wherever you live is where you might raise a child.
Owning a house can be great, but the best way to do it is to think about it like buying a used car. Realize the people you are working with are nicer, smarter used car salesmen. Check everything out with true third parties and be ready to back out.
This article was interesting but I don't think the author was at any risk of making a financial mistake. At the end of the day, Sunrun had a lien on the property. The title company and the lender would not allow the sale to go through unless the Jug estate was able to deliver a clear title. If the title company somehow missed the fact that Sunrun had a lien on the property, the author's title insurance would cover the damages.
> Check everything out with true third parties and be ready to back out.
The insurance company, title company, lender, and home inspector are already highly incentivized to ensure that the property isn't a dud.
Its par for the course - realtors rarely know anything at all about the property they are selling other than what the MLS says (and the MLS is often inaccurate and/or missing information). I was looking at a house and asked if the fireplace was functional and the seller's agent answered with "I don't live here, so I don't know." Another time, back when I was looking to rent, I asked about laundry facilities in the building, she was like "idk." Neither even offered to get an answer for me.
Also, an earlier poster said that inspectors are highly motivated to protect you. I can only offer anecdotes, but my experience was that realtors liked some inspectors more than others. All inspectors probably know they have to tell you about big problems. Some are really thorough about all issues including small ones. Realtors, who want to get the deal done, hate the nitpicky inspectors. But nitpicky is good for negotiating. I am no expert, I am just sharing my impression.
That's a pretty strange sentiment. 20 years ago, solar was decidedly more expensive than it is now. A fair price would be higher than grid power. For the installation to have occurred at all, the up front capital cost had to be amortized by a for-profit company in an attractive way. This appears to have been crafted as a payment schedule that's slightly back-heavy. Seems to me that the author just didn't want to be left holding the bag, but still wanted to pay lip service and feel like a good environmentalist.
Another important point, in my opinion, is the cost given in the second quote below is a fair cost. $6000 over 20 years is an average cost of $300 per year. If you are purchasing 2016-era installed solar, knowing that it is a less cost-effective form of electricity generation than conventional means, an amortized (predicted) cost of $300 per year is fair. Refusing to pay this and still claiming to "be willing to pay a little extra to help the planet" is hypocritical.
>I got ahold of a copy of Jug’s contract, and quickly saw how Sunrun could afford to extend such an offer. It lasted 20 years. The payments escalated annually by 2.9 percent—they’d be 72 percent higher by 2036. The tax credit was worth at least $5,000.
>If Southern California Edison's residential rates continue to rise annually by 2.2 percent, as they have on average over the last decade, Jug's total electricity outlay having gone solar would have cost about $6,000 more over 20 years.
Of course someone needed to pay, but it seems wrong to pay extra for electricity they are not using to pay lip service for supporting a for-profit company who had locked in the plan with an earlier contract.
For a 20 year lease, do you really want to be using a 19 year old system stuck on your roof ? Big clunky, weathered with spiderwebs. What does that look like?
Source: my house has 23 year old solar panels, my garage has 10 year old panels, they all still produce plenty of electricity.
There are plenty of reasons to avoid dealing with these companies, but this isn't one of them.
Solar panels usually are warrantied to at least 80% of nameplace capacity out to 25 years. And there are hard caps on 1) PV efficiency (Shockley–Queisser) 2) insolation that are non-negotiable physics. If that system is clean and reasonably maintained, it will be 80% as good as they day you bought it (and probably 80% as good as a brand new system) in a quarter of a century.
Like the other poster in this thread said: sure your Athlon 500mhz is still runninnfine, even at 80% efficiency
As renewables have started becoming competitive (both utility-scale and distributed), utilities have been able to avoid building more expensive fossil-based power plants and transmission lines as quickly and thus rates haven't increased as much as before. So basically the solar industry partially created their own financial situation where the utility costs they are offsetting are lower because of their own participation in the market. Ha.
Anyway, I'm glad this in-the-weeds analysis is getting some coverage. As more and more "Distributed Energy Resources" (DERs) are installed in homes ($300 smart thermostats, $1k demand response water heaters, $5k batteries, $10k solar, etc.), people should be aware they need to do utility bill cost analysis earlier in the home buying process. Also, realtors need to get more savvy on utility bill cost impact of all these new DERs so they know how to adjust pricing based on what's installed in a home or building.
Disclaimer: I have a software company that many solar companies use to request utility bill history from customers for financial analysis.
http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
The industry term for this is called the "Duck Curve", where you install so much solar that you mostly reduce daytime electricity demand, but have peaks in the morning and evening.
I'm pretty sure the usage peak period is more like noon to six p.m. The grid demand peak is now 6-8 p.m., because of customer-site solar.
I wish I had the kind of income that made me call that a 'minor cost' !
•Nobody knows what California electricity prices are going to do in the next 20 years. By terminating the system, they just traded certainty for volatility. With that attitude I hope they financed using an ARM loan.
•They whined about how expensive it was, but also expressed a desire to have one or two kids someday. When you have kids, your electric bills tend to go up, and they did their math based on their "expected" usage today.
•Santa Barbara has a very mild climate, but I expect in the coming years it will get hotter and muggier much more of the year, and for health reasons they'll have to put a room A/C on. Whoa, now you're using as much juice as Jug did.
•PV rooftop panels in California nowadays don't quite "help the planet" to the extent their owners believe they do. The duck curve continues to get worse.
•A silent majority of people think PV panels are ugly. Like, hideously ugly. They're afraid to speak out, but not to act out and point the finger at a different reason.
The end result of this whole thing reminds me of one of those people 10 years ago who bought a top-end $500 cellphone locked in to a carrier on a 3-year-plan but only $50 a month, let the payments lapse 3 months in, and then tried to sell it on eBay, angry at the cellphone company for financially hobbling them when it wouldn't sell or it got returned.
That's true but with the way most utility costs have been dropping, the rates are probably not going to skyrocket.
> using more power
The problem is the rate being too high. More use doesn't help the problem.
> duck curve
Sure, but not very important to this choice.
> A silent majority of people think PV panels are ugly. Like, hideously ugly.
Do you have evidence of how common that is? Does that include installations that are well-integrated into the roof?
> cell plan
A typical cell phone contract breaking fee is $350, with some pro-rating. This roughly covers the cost of a phone discount. They don't try to charge you $1400 for the entire remaining contract term.
With strict liability for wildfires, 'green deals', cap-and-trade or Pigovian tax proposals, California's classic policy insanities, grids potentially struggling with renewables and load sharing, you certainly cannot be >99% confident that there will be no large increases in the offing.
I respect what you say, but it'll be $532.78 for that window air conditioner. Cash or charge?
I'm not surprised Sunrun chose not to tell them about that option as it seems like a losing situation for them. They claim that Sunrun would have been covered, but that merely means they fail to lose money. They stood to make money on that system, and no sane solar panel buyer is going to have heavily used panels put in.
>Aided by a local attorney and my father-in-law, a retired contract attorney, I drafted a letter to Jug’s trust accusing the listing agents of failing to deliver title to the property free of any third-party claims as the agents had said they could. I threatened legal action. It was a last-ditch effort that none of us expected to work. Then it did.
I'm not surprised this worked. Their whole job is to present the actual situation during the sale and they failed at it. There are probably a lot of legal issues with what they did and I bet the agent was quaking in their boots at the thought of that going to trial.
Never take action that is going to jeopardize free and clear title on your real estate.
If you want protection for anything after the sale, you buy owners title insurance.
We bought a house with solar panels in 2016. The seller had purchased the system less than a year before the house went on the market, and one of the key selling points was that there was no lease to deal with; by purchasing the home, we would 100% own the solar panels and would reap all the benefits of what they generated.
Six months after the sale was finalized, we changed Internet providers and soon after that, we were forwarded an email by the seller from an organization we had never heard of, asking us to reconnect the solar panels to the Internet as a condition of their contract.
Um ... what contract?
It turns out that when the seller purchased the panels, they made a deal with this green-energy company, which was sort of a joint venture between our state's biggest utility and the state itself. The organization paid the seller $6K up front. The seller, in turn, agreed that for the next 20 years, any Solar Renewable Energy Credits generated by the panels would belong to the organization.
The existence of this contract, which included a lien on the SRECS, was never disclosed to us. And it never showed up on the title search because the lien was on this abstract credit, not on any physical property. The lawyer who did the closing had never heard of anything like it!
We ended up having to get a different lawyer involved, and it was a big production, because not only had the organization dealt with relatively few transfers of ownership, it had never dealt with a case where the SRECS contract was not transferred as part of the home sale, and undoing the mess the seller had caused by not disclosing it took a lot of legal legwork.
In the end, the organization agreed to remove the lien, rather than continue a legal battle, and I assume it then went after the seller for whatever portion of the $6K advance payment it could recoup.
The lesson I learned from all of this is that when it comes to solar panels, not even the people in the industry have much experience with the edge cases. And although installations are starting to become routine, transfers of ownership are not yet routine.
(By the way, the solar panels work well, and our energy bills are very low, but I wish someone would have told me that squirrels love to build nests under the panels and chew through wires, because yeah, that's happened, and it's not covered under the warranty.)
IMO, solar generally complicates all housing related transactions, but it's worth it.
There are schemes where you can get fixed price SRECs by signing them over to a 3rd-party. The third-party then give you a fixed amount monthly or quarterly or whatever but it's a significant discount on the auction price.
There are also companies that will give you a lump sum for your 10-years of SRECs up front but like all 'need cash now' schemes there is a significant discount.
Wouldn't the author have been able to take the price of buying out the lease off their taxes?
In scenarios like this, the seller eats the remaining lease cost when the property is sold (think of it as a reduction in sales price).
I pay US$7.94 a month to my utility to "store" megawatt-hours of electricity over the course of a year. Brand-name home battery storage is still well over $500 per kilowatt-hour installed.
So yeah, I'll engage in shameless commerce with the evil corporate utility if they'll loan me a $2.5-million-dollar "battery" for less than 8 bucks a month.
Don't lease anything on your house; it's a huge hassle. Get a loan/HELOC for it if necessary and the numbers work out, but don't enter into a long leasing agreement that can cause transferral problems down the road.
I think the people these sorts of things appeal to are the people who have poor credit and/or very little equity in their house.
I'm unsure how I feel about this. $30 is a significant % of the electric bill, but is a very small % of the cost of owning a home.
Didn't solar start as economically viable due to heavy government tax incentives? I'm ignorant of the data, but I thought solar was not fit for public deployment has only edge use cases.
There's no point in throwing away money on a losing proposition, since in this case the homeowner wouldn't be the one to get the credit. As an additional bonus, your home will have newer, more efficient panels with a longer remaining estimated lifetime, so if you do end selling the house they'll add more value.
A solar install in a reasonably sunny climate can pay for itself over its lifespan, but you need to actually stay there the whole time, or hope that the added value to your house makes up for whatever your investment was.
Isn't the math that came to that conclusion completely fucked up?
$115(1.022 ^ 20) = $177
$75
(1.029 ^ 20) + $17 * (1.022 ^ 20) = $159In fact, I'm about 100% sure that that $6000 figure is the amount of additional money that is payed to sunrun due to the increase costs (difference between $75/month for 20 years and the cost with 2.9% increase). It looks like the journalist then went and misinterpreted that data and made up a completely fake chart below it to fit their interpretation of the data. In that chart, clearly the socal edison side should start with a higher cost than the sunrun side and the socal edison cost at 20 years should actually be above the $2k line.
If you're thinking "Wow, that's nuts that people would spend 100% of what a lender will qualify them for," then, I say to you "Welcome to America."
It sounded odd, as in; who would buy a house where something on the roof was generating income for the previous owner? - Wouldn't you (the buyer) just buy them out? No idea how this was structured - anyone have any background?
Another annoyance was the inverter box that SunRun installed right outside my bedroom. Every morning and night, the system would turn on and off several times as the light levels were close to the threshold. This meant some rather large relays were clicking repeatedly, waking me up at dawn a lot of the time. On the plus side, I got a new breaker panel and had my service rating upgraded from 100A to 150A.
If I had to sum it up, I'd say that SunRun isn't absolutely evil, but if I ever do it again I would buy the system outright, assuming it was economically viable. My personal opinion is that residential solar is a misallocation of resources as long as there are commercial rooftops without solar.
The whole article is worth reading but this headache is specifically related to leased panels. Though, leasing makes going solar easier, it is a terrible idea because of issues like these.
Also, every local power company has different arrangements for residents. I live in Suffolk county, Long Island, New York. Our power company arrangement is amazing. We get to sell back any excess power at the same rate we buy it from them. Meaning, they act like a free battery.
I have a 20 years term that started from the day I installed my panels to use up any excess energy they're holding for me. After that 20 years term is over, they pay me the wholesale rate for any leftover power, which is next to nothing.
I don't pay extra fees for net metering but we do have the highest rates in the nation. It's roughly $0.20/kwh, including delivery, taxes and other fees.
If I end up having any extra power and Crypto is still a thing, I'd just plug in a miner and drain it all. It'd be a bonus if I did it during winter and use the heat to warm the house.
Regarding the purchase, I financed the purchase. Got 0% loan on the expected tax credit portion and 6.5% on the rest for 15 years. Even with the interest rates, I'll be cash-flow positive on the monthly payments.
I also essentially locked in my utility costs. My local power company is expected to raise rates 3-5% a year. If I pay my loan off early, I get to avoid those rate increases for the portion of electricity that my panels cover.
Anyway, if you're thinking about going solar, check your local utility rules and go for the purchase option. Leases are not worth the baggage they come with.
But from a homeowner's point of view and Sunrun's point of view it makes sense. Lots of people might not be able use the tax credit because they already owe have low income tax (moderate income + mortgage interest deduction, or retired with a nice nest egg will get you to very low income tax).
(If you pay enough income tax to use the credit you should just get a loan and avoid this.)
This was legislated poorly, probably in order to call it a "tax credit" instead of "subsidy". A subsidy would be much cleaner, have the same economics and they should just do it that way. This whole mess and industry was created just for this one talking point. The government giving you $2000 off an installation is the same as getting a $2000 tax credit from the Treasury's point of view.
Sunrun sounds like not the best business to be involved with. Like "new buyer doesn't want the system" is an obvious thing for the customer service manual. (Referring to "...prepay the lease and leave the hardware ... I’ve been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000").
Also they are clearly selling this to a bunch of people who could easily use the tax credit and could easily get a homeowner's loan. Super dodgy. I'll bet a lot of the sales nonsense is to hide this fact.
That said, central issue mentioned in this article aside (which is legit concerning), cost wasn't really an issue I spent much time worrying about. Am I the only person more interested in giving the middle finger to my corrupt utility provider and their coal-centered power generation strategy than whether I came out a few bucks ahead or behind in 20 years? I suspect a lot of people who install solar have similar motivations.
But that in itself can be a problem, too. The thing that concerns me about household solar is that it's a bit like owning a Prius - it becomes a status symbol for people more interested in _appearing_ green and assuaging their guilt than actual concern about their total carbon footprint. Take a vacation to Hawaii once a year and you'll probably knock off every single bit of good you did for the planet.
They should’ve just demanded that money as part of escrow and now they’re left with a debt in someone else’s name that is never going to be paid and likely a headache for us in the future.
Stop paying these racket companies and their dumbass contracts. The DIY is totally easy.
First, at the end the sales rep who provided the #s is bullshit. The sales reps are notorious for inputting whatever #s they want into the internal SFDC system so the average monthly bill isn’t accurate. This isn’t an exception, it’s their own rule to accelerate sales (management does not tell them to do this. To be specific)
The 2.9% escalator is an aggressive and risky product, but requires zero upfront and an incredibly low initial $/kWh. He more than likely was saving money and would have been for at least several years. I don’t know his intentions but you can read between the lines and I don’t want to talk about the dead.
Also, I forget if Conedison does tier pricing, but if it did with all his gadgets, his bill would have been through the roof.
Lastly, Sunrun does offer cash/loan/0%/1.9%/prepaid products, and if I were to go for a cash deal, I would use Sunrun/Vivint/SolarCity because it’s a huge headache to coordinate with developers and file all the correct paperwork.
For panels that are paid off it's a great deal to pay a little more for the house. It just becomes a tax-deductible loan even though it saves you money each month.
Authority (City, Utility, etc.) typically push and constrain the installation at least 3-6 weeks and they rarely actually know Solar well enough to be a real 'Authority'. Lots of poorly implemented review procedures from untrained city officials and inspectors. Many unnecessary revisions, nitpicks, and expensive truck rolls surface here.
Then we also have Sales and Financing Providers who have the most leverage out of the stakeholders. High leverage also means they tend to get the biggest cut for a given Solar contract. High commissions and high fees or they leave the installation company who has to fulfill a 2-6 month-payout-delay pipeline. The fulfillment team also has the most people to retain, train, and coordinate over what is typically a multi-state field operation problem.
Not at all easy. Still, it boils my blood seeing some of these organizations fall prey to these pressures and turn to customer exploitation. What it amounts to is some deep-rooted systemic issues with the government-enforced monopolies of our utility companies, overly-simplistic incentives, and a market moving faster than the training and organizational development.
It's too bad the company couldn't come to terms somehow; surely accepting less money in a buy-out offer would have been better for them than having to come out and collect all of their equipment?
edit: and you have to get more than halfway through to see the author managed to take the path of maximal pain: "Sunrun calls our insistence that Jug’s trust buy out and remove the system “incredibly unique and rare.” It’s far more common for home sellers to transfer the lease to the buyer—Sunrun says 94 percent of customers do this—or to prepay the lease and leave the hardware on the roof for the next owner to use. I’ve been kicking myself ever since I learned about this latter option. It would have saved the estate around $12,000 and allowed us to support solar and get “free” electricity, even as Sunrun remained responsible for maintenance and repairs."
edit 2: "On consumer review sites and in local news reports, rueful customers warn others to stay away from TPO solar offered by Sunrun and other companies" - is that true of everything, and none cited? What if this was an article about car dealership?
edit 3: Having finished the article (and having never heard of Sunrun prior to this) it has the feel of a hit-piece. I don't think it is necessarily (author seems to have a solid investigative journalism track record), but it cherry picks very small sets of data without context and it frames things in what seems like a maximally negative way. Not sure if their experience with their specific bad experience and Bloomberg's comp based on moving markets had anything to do with it.
While this is just a prejudice and their financial engineering _may_ be totally sound, this makes me think of CDOs and the mortgage crisis and all that.
The fact that the deal may not actually be all that good for the consumer -- and may complicate sales of their house since it's effectively a lien forcing future buyers to take a deal which may be _more apparent as bad_ in the future -- only makes me again think of the financial hijinx that led to the mortgage bubble/crisis.
After all that, my wife’s intuition was still crucial in nixing the panels.
Ultimately, my state offered better financing than a traditional mortgage. I just wonder what's going to happen if I ask a buyer in 5, 10, or 20 years to pay for the panels. They clearly reduce the home's energy consumption, and thus have a clear demonstrated value.
I still dont know why they have called me several hundred times.
Running the numbers, if you are privileged enough to have the money to just buy the damn panels and get them installed outright, you're way, way better off. I don't know if there's still good tax credits, but when I looked, they got you a good chunk of change right there. After that, solar panels pay for themselves in a pretty short amount of time if your electricity usage is high enough to take full advantage of them (eg: if you have a central hvac system or something), or have someone who will buy the surplus from you.
In my building, our power usage is way higher than we can get even if we covered the entire roof with panels, so it's pretty easy: put panels, reduce electricity cost, make up the money in a couple of years, don't deal with any third party aside for the installation.
Talk about corruption and dishonest practices.
In Florida, FPL, the electric provider for half of Florida, complained for about a decade (from 2004-2014) on how how they needed to keep raising rates so that they could continue to "upgrade the infrastructure" so that they could be prepared for the hurricanes that inevitably would hit the coast.
Some estimates that FPL made a few extra billion dollars on the price increases that went beyond normal inflation.
What do you think happened when south Florida got hit with the next major hurricane in 2014? Yup. same outages that we saw in 2004.
And the hurricanes weren't even worse.
10 years and billions of dollars in "upgrades" resulted in the same exact problems.
FPL took our money and didn't do anything with it.
AND they have been vehemently against people owning solar panels, even going as far as blocking legislation that would allow people to install them on their own homes without special permission from "FPL approved" companies.
And you can guess how many "approved" companies they would actually approve.
I have yet to see any major utility company operate with any decency, so while this solar panel company is doing some shady shit with their salespeople and leasing terms, it at least didn't scam millions of people for billions of dollars like FPL.
Florida should have the cleanest electricity in the world. Sunshine almost every day, but we don't have it because:
A) We don't price in the environmental impact of non-solar producing coal and natural gas plants, thus keeping solar "more expensive" than fossil fuel electricity.
B) FPL actively blocks the widespread adoption of solar panels on people's homes.
C) Politicians are happy to take money from FPL and other interest groups that don't want to adopt solar.
Problem with this is its not cheap. Not to mention many localities want to make this option simply illegal.
Wow, this is violence! With such extremisms being legit, one must not be surprised, if extremism rises on all fronts!
Who likes business (wo)men?
