I Bought a House with Solar Panels • Hacker News Board

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#11

Post by sthu11182 » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:42 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #4

>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…

regarding the legal action: based on my recollection from real estate class in law school, failing to provide a free and clear title on a general warranty deed is a pretty straight forward victory. if i remember anything from that class, always get a general warranty deed (ie a deed with all the covenants) when buying a house.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#12

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

CompelTechnic wrote: post #2

>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it. 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…

[deleted]

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#13

Post by imgabe » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

When you get down into the meat of how the tax credits and Sunrun's financing work it's astonishing.

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.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#14

Post by macspoofing » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

rrauenza wrote: post #10

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #5

>One former Bay Area employee sent me a Sunrun training manual he said was current when he resigned in April 2017. It’s called “Power Play 2.0: The Guide to Successfully Sell Sunrun.” (The company confirmed its authenticity.) It instructs salespeople to sow distrust in and disdain for traditional utilities and appeal to customers’ emotions. Over 61 pages, pain is cited at least 31 times and fear at least a dozen. Whe…

We got a quote from sun run - it made us uncomfortable how all of their numbers assumed ridiculous utility rate increases. And our gut said we should just wait and purchase instead. 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 ev…

To be fair, the cost of solar panels at the time you were considering them was what it was. Someone needed to pay for them. If that someone is Sunrun, they need to recoup those cost and make a return. You can be as creative as you want with the financing, that reality won't change. You could have gotten a bank loan too.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#15

Post by daveFNbuck » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

CompelTechnic wrote: post #2

>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it. 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…

The article is about a solar installation done in 2016.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#16

Post by throwaway5752 » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

FYI, this has nothing to do with solar panels and everything to do with a buying a house that has stuff with transferable contracts. Save up and buy your solar outright, companies don't lease things to you unless there is profit in it.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#17

Post by nappy-doo » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

A couple years ago, we purchased and had installed a solar system. In MA, there is an incentive program called SRECs, which is a program where the utilities have to buy MWH of produced electricity, and I can sell my MWH of produced electricity -- that's tracked as an SREC. I can sell SRECs for 10 years, I make about 5-6 a year, and they go for 200-300$. It makes the payoff on the system about 4 years, and ROIC about 17%. If, when I go to sell, the 10 year window on the SRECs haven't finished the buyer and I will have to come to an arrangement for the remaining credits.

IMO, solar generally complicates all housing related transactions, but it's worth it.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#18

Post by matthewdgreen » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:49 PM UTC

CompelTechnic wrote: post #2

>Supporting renewable energy is important, and I get spending a little more to help the planet. But a for-profit company like Sunrun wasn’t my idea of the right place to do it. 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…

Seems like one thing to make the payment schedule back-heavy and be honest about it, another thing to use unrealistic assumptions about utility price increases to disguise this payment schedule as a lifetime cost savings.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#19

Post by diafygi » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:51 PM UTC

Not trying to discredit or de-emphasize the conclusion, but the ironic thing here is that the utility cost escalation rates that Sunrun had initially calculated were likely based off of pre-solar boom tariff increases.

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.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#20

Post by city41 » Thu, Feb 14, 2019, 3:53 PM UTC

We bought a house with TPO panels from SolarCity. It's been ... ok. Our monthly payment never goes up for the life of the lease and SolarCity sends us a check if the panels ever don't produce enough. They provide 100% of our electricity and we generate excess that the power company pays us a tiny amount for.

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.