12.6 Watch out for shell-company installers

The U.S. market has many solar shell companies. These companies do only one thing — convince you to sign a contract. Every downstream activity — design, permit, install, inspection — is subcontracted out. To bait the signature, they will write almost any promise into the contract: 20-year warranties, free equipment replacement after 10 years, you name it.

But they typically dissolve the LLC after about two years, then the same people reopen under a new name and start hunting customers again. The new entity has no obligation to old contracts and starts fresh with no reviews against it.

So when homeowners say "the company that installed my solar went out of business," what often actually happened is a deliberate corporate molt.

This pattern is one of the root causes of how dysfunctional the U.S. residential solar market currently is.