David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Imageshen a door-to-door salesman showed up at Christine Palmer’s door in 2022 telling her she could save money by going solar, she and her husband decided to make the investment.
Meanwhile, GoodLeap, the company that loaned her the money to buy the panels, is still calling constantly, trying to collect on the loan, she says. Titan was supposed to come out to try to fix the panels on a Friday after dozens of previous attempts, but on Thursday night she started seeing on Facebook that Titan was going out of business. Palmer confirmed that the company was kaput and her emails to representatives bounced back as undeliverable.
What’s more, some solar companies offered warranties for solar panels, promising to fix broken panels for up to 25 years, but then did not set aside money to fulfill those warranties and fix nonworking systems, says Agopian. That means they can’t fix the panels—and the cost of trying to maintain all those systems sends them into bankruptcy.