Getting Answers: some solar panel contracts leave customers in the dark

SPRINGFIELD, MA (WGGB/WSHM) — The popularity of residential solar power is surging across the country and in western Massachusetts but before you sign any contracts, you need to make sure you know exactly what you’re getting into.

Drive through any neighborhood in western Massachusetts and you’re bound to see them: rooftop solar panels. They are almost as numerous are the many companies now offering them which promise you everything from affordable and renewable electricity to increased property values and selling advantages. For Paul Mikuszewski of Wilbraham, who bought solar panels for his former house in Agawam about seven years ago, the green energy option made sense at first, plus he said the salesperson assured him if he ever decided to sell his house, which he wasn’t planning to do, but if he ever did, the panels wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, they’d be an asset. “But they told us ‘If you buy it, don’t worry if you sell. It’s the easiest process to sell your house with solar panels. It’s actually a selling point. People love it. It’s… any kind of loan you have is transferable,’ so we were like ‘Oh, this is great,’” he said.

The difference he saw on his monthly electric bills was also great. As far as he and his wife were concerned, they weren’t only saving the environment, they were also saving money. “It generated so many kilowatts and, every month, we’d look at our bill and what we would be spending, so it was like, ‘Okay, yeah, it makes sense.’ [Reporter: you were happy with it?] We were happy with it and then we went to sell the house,” Mikuszewski added.

That’s when the darker side of some solar companies revealed itself because, as it turned out, Mikuszewski couldn’t sell his house. “Even the real estate agents don’t really know a whole heck of a lot about the ins and outs of it because each contract is unique and so, when we went to go sell, I went from loving solar to hating it,” Mikuszewski explained.

Even though he decided to buy, instead of lease, his own solar panels, he was still paying them off on a loan and, while he was assured that the loan was transferrable when he sold his house, that’s not what happened because the loan holder refused to transfer it to the new buyers. So Mikuszewski was left with a difficult choice: pay off the loan out-of-pocket for more than $30,000 or cancel the sale of his house. “They had a lien on my house, so it turns out the whole loan had to be paid off before I could sell the house. [Reporter: you didn’t know that?] I didn’t know that. [Reporter: they didn’t tell you that] That was not very explicit,” he noted.

Mikuszewski then turned to longtime real estate attorney Christine Webster in West Springfield. “I just think this stuff is egregious because almost 100 percent of my sellers tell me that when they signed up for the solar panel leases, they were told if you sell your house, no problem. The rep represented to them the new owner will just take it over, it’s easy,” she said.

The complex and confusing tangle of solar panel contracts, sometimes 40 or more pages long, isn’t easy to understand at all and that’s a problem, Webster said, is becoming more and more common. “I told you Chris, when I took an opportunity to look through the solar panel leases ‘I’m like ‘this is crazy’. I mean, as an attorney for over 25 years, I feel like they’re so difficult to sift through,” she noted.

Webster was the first to admit that not all solar companies are the same because not all of their contracts are the same, but the lease or purchasing contracts she’s dealt with can be a nightmare by tying homeowners into a decades-long agreement with a solar company that may not even be around for that long and, if your solar company goes out of business, you’re still on the hook. “My clients were saying ‘I have these solar panels, I’m still paying this lease payment, but the panels don’t work,’” she added. “They would call companies to see if somebody else would agree to service the panels. No one wanted to service the panels. [Reporter: so they’re paying for panels that don’t work?] They’re paying for panels that don’t work. The companies are no longer, they’re defunct, and they can’t get anyone to service it.”

For Milagros Johnson, Director of the Springfield Mayor’s Office of Consumer Information, it’s a familiar refrain: consumers getting blindsided with the promise of cheap energy, but the all-too-common experience of an expensive reality. “I’ve seen the contracts. My family and friends have them and I’ve seen the contracts and they’re very, very detailed with a lot of fine print. Who reads those?” she asked.

That, right there, is the crux of the problem because whether you read it or even understand it, once you sign it, you’re locked in. “Anything that consumers sign, whether buying a vehicle or buying an appliance or service of membership, they’re not reading. They’re going by what the salesperson tells them and, let me tell you, more often than you think, there’s a big difference,” Johnson added.

For Mikuszewski, that difference ended up costing him tens of thousands of dollars to finally get out of his solar contract and eventually sell his house, but as for his new home, he explained, “we won’t put solar just because you never know what happens. You never know. Life changes and, if you have to sell the house, I’d be concerned with selling the house with solar on it and be in the same situation again.”

Again, not all solar companies use questionable practices, but you need to do your homework and read the contract.

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