Here's a cautionary tale of purchasing a home with solar panels, even if they're not leased from a third party.
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.)