BY ALANA SEMUELS
FINANCE
A DECADE AGO, SOMEONE KNOCKING ON YOUR DOOR TO sell you solar panels would have been selling you solar panels. These days, they are probably selling you a financial product—likely a lease or a loan.
Mary Ann Jones, 83, didn’t realize this until she received a call last year from GoodLeap, a financial-technology company, saying she owed $52,564.28 for a solar-panel loan that expires when she’s 106, and costs more than she originally paid for her house.
In 2022, she says, a door-to-door salesman from the company Solgen Construction showed up at her house on the outskirts of Fresno, Calif., pushing what he claimed was a government program affiliated with her utility to get her free solar panels. At one point, he had her touch his tablet device, she says, but he never said she was signing a contract with Solgen or a loan document with GoodLeap. She’s on a fixed income of $960 a month and cannot afford the loan she says she was tricked into signing up for; she’s now fighting both Solgen and GoodLeap in court.
Her case is not uncommon. Solar customers across the country say that salespeople obscure the specific terms of the financial agreements and cloud the value of the products they peddle. Related court cases are starting to pile up. “I have been practicing consumer law for over a decade, and I’ve never seen anything like what we are seeing in the solar industry right now,” says Kristin Kemnitzer, who represents Jones and says her firm gets “multiple” calls every week from potential clients with similar stories.
Angry customers aren’t the only reason the solar industry is in trouble. Some of the nation’s biggest public solar companies are struggling to stay afloat as questions arise over the viability of the financial products they sold—both to their consumers and to investors.
At a time when solar is supposed to be saving the world, looming financial problems threaten to topple the U.S. residential solar industry. Though rooftop solar in 2022 generated just 4.7% of the nation’s electricity, if widely deployed it could eventually meet residential electricity demand in many states. But according to Roth Capital Partners, in late 2023 alone more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy—six times the number in the previous three years combined.
The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both
