By Robert Bradley Jr.
“[Radiant Solar] was able to [rip off homeowners] in part because home solar energy systems are complicated, expensive things — they often cost around $50,000 — typically involving layers of financing and tax incentives that leave many consumers confused.”
The rooftop solar industry might be in freefall and on the way out, but the damage of bad performance and long-term contracts endures. The New York Times article, “New York Sues Solar Panel Firm, Saying It Bilked Hundreds of Customers (January 29, 2026),” explains how the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection is seeking almost $20 million in restitution and penalties from ‘home improvement contractor’ Radiant Solar.
In all, “300 victims of the same company, Radiant Solar, which left a trail of damaged homes, large debts and broken promises across the city,” the article reported.
It was able to do so in part because home solar energy systems are complicated, expensive things — they often cost around $50,000 — typically involving layers of financing and tax incentives that leave many consumers confused. The city says that in addition to ripping off homeowners, Radiant undermined the efforts of the city and state governments to shift to cleaner energy.
CEO William James Bushell joins Sunnova’s John Berger and others in the business Hall of Shame.
According to the lawsuit, filed with the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, Radiant’s solar panel systems often failed to deliver the energy savings it had advertised and sometimes did not work at all.
The company padded loans with hefty and undisclosed kickbacks to lenders, failed to see projects through to approval by the city and did not file paperwork for customers to receive tax credits, the suit says. It also ran a bogus sweepstakes for a new Tesla, according to the suit.
Radiant repeatedly signed people up for loans without their consent, the city claims, saddling them with monthly payments of hundreds of dollars for years. “A more blatant form of deception is hard to imagine,” the lawsuit says.
A Wide Problem
The subsidy-infested rooftop solar industry is all about making a highly uneconomic enterprise economic through complicated long-term leasing contracts. Numerous leading rooftop solar firms are bankrupt. Part II tomorrow will update the mess created by the demise of Sunnova, the largest company in this solar space. Part III on Friday will share a social media exchange with a rooftop solar apologist where the weakest argument is mistakenly made rather than remaining silent.
The thing is though, nobody could possibly have seen this coming.
Oh wait . . .
😳 🏁
The chickens are coming home to roost.
Bad climate science has created a lot of skeptics. The numbers will continue to grow.
At least with chickens, you can get eggs.
At the root of the scam sits the junk science of Mann cs. I hope to see the day when that lot has to justify themselves in front of a judge and jury.
I always considered rooftop solar as virtue signalling. It was like driving a Prius, which was weird enough looking to make it obvious as to your devotion to The Cause.
I always considered rooftop solar as an ugly way to tell your neighbors f— off. I liked Pyius though. If I hadn’t been driving kids to school it would have been a better fit to my lifestyle than the SUV I once bought.
I thought of them as a way to damage your roof (and make repairs or replacement much more expensive), increase your risk of fire, increase your risk of pollution liability, and decrease the resale value of your home.
I’ll never buy a house with solar panels on it.
I made sure that my solar panels were on the roof of the steel framed, Colorbond roof and walls, shed, not on the timber framed house roof.
Yep.
And once you succumb to wokester leftist ideology, you have to sign up for the “whole package”. With virtuous dedication and frequent overt demonstration.
And then your worst fear in life becomes not that the anthropological doom conjectures you promote will actually happen, it’s that you might inadvertently say or post something that gets you ‘canceled’ by your fellow wokesters.
There lies a horrible doom that no woke ideologue ever wants to meet.
The rooftop solar scam doesn’t just hurt those foolish enough to fall for it. Everyone else on the grid is in essence subsidizing the solar scam through higher electric rates. It’s the scam that keeps on scamming.
There’s a lot of rooftop solar, currently buried under snow, here in CT. I would really like to know how much of our third highest in the nation electricity rates goes towards subsidizing my neighbors’ panels, but it seems to literally be a state secret.
“Approximately 44% to 45% of New York State’s population lives within New York City.”
I forget sometimes that the big buildings half of New Yorkers live in are just in one little corner of a state bigger than North Carolina. The other half live in places that would make sense for solar if not for 100 other reasons.
(Not sure how this came up as a response to a comment about “sharing the fail”. I was probably thinking about “who’s paying for this mess”.)
I am in Rochester, NY on the lee side of Lake Ontario and we are the second cloudiest city in the USA. Everyone up here knows that solar power is borderline useless as a reliable energy source. Fortunately we have natural gas and nukes (Ginna), but electricity prices are still high here.
Story alert – Lifelong Detroit Neighbor Says Van Dyke Solar Park Is Pushing Her Out
Well your state is beholden to the Eco-Nazis, so that explains the high electricity prices.
Herr Hochul would look quite at home in an SS uniform.
We got into rooftop solar in 2012 when they were offering stupid deals on FIT tariffs with 25 yr contracts all index-linked.
It’s been a brilliant investment, bugger all electric (except when you don’t need it), but loads of cash.!!
Currently, we get paid ~£0.76/kWh for all we produce, for something worth just £0.04.3/kWh.
(UK Wholesale price = £0.04.3/kWh. Retail price ~ £0.25/kWh.)
That’s the economics of the madhouse (well, it was promoted by Westminster ), & 11 more years of guaranteed income to come.
Yes, it’s a scam … promoted by Westminster for ideological reasons. We use the income to offset the massive increase in prices, caused by governments’ mad schemes.
This is very similar to the situation in California. Lot’s of tax incentives from both the feds and the state made it economically sensible. I’ve had rooftop solar since 2014 when then lowest tier of energy cost $0.13/kWh. That was the agreed upon rate that they would purchase my excess energy. Now it’s $0.36/kWh and I am looking at making money off these things now. It is a total scam… all the ratepayers without solar are paying for my electricity and then some.
I didn’t get these things because I thought I was saving the world, I got them because I didn’t trust the CA government. What I expected would happen is exactly what has happened… they made electricity ridiculously expensive.
I’ve got 8 more years left on the agreement I have with CA (assuming they don’t pull the rug out from underneath me) at which time I will be long gone from this state.
President Barack Obama
January 2008
“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
“If somebody wants to build a coal plant, they can — it’s just that it will bankrupt them…”
You’re not helping by jumping on the scamwagon. If nobody did that, their stupid ideas would be rightfully stillborn.
Nope. Playing by their rules and protecting my income at the same is what I was trying to do. Their stupid ideas would still remain and I’d be paying a hell of a lot more for electricity.
Googled to check that “they often cost around $50,000”:
“People also ask
What is the average price for solar panels?
Average cost of solar by state
State Average system cost before incentives* Average cost per watt ($/W)*
California $22,271 $2.43
Colorado $30,151 $2.82
Connecticut $30,910 $2.77
Washington D.C. $31,026 $3.01”
Google only showed 4 states… price seems to be ascending. Grrr gone. Tab turned into advertisements to buy rooftop solar.
Was that the base cost without financing?
“Average”
One of several ways of getting a measure of central tendency. Likely, the median would be better if there are lots and lots of quite small installations.
Add-Aesthetics-to-the-Space-696×412.png (696×412)
In the late summer of 2024, my neighbors down the road had a rooftop solar system installed on their farm’s maintenance shed. It cost $22,000. The company that installed it went under in December, 2025, leaving them to fend for themselves during what would have been the warranty period.
A fool and his money are easily parted.
That still holds.
Here in the UK the energy company obligation scheme ECO4 provided grants for insulation, heat pumps and solar panels.
The UK i newspaper reports that at least £165m is believed to have been fraudulently claimed by cowboy companies since 2022. Companies lied and forged signatures on documents and even companies as far away as Pakistan were able to sign off projects.
Meanwhile thousands of people have been left with botched installations (i paper 23 Feb)
Cue an inquiry… how could it have possibly happened?
Leftists in charge? If so, how could it NOT happen?
Here’s a part of the 20 acre solar “farm” behind my ‘hood in north central Wokeachusetts 3 days after the blizzard.
And here’s behind my house. Trying to clear off the cement patio. Behind it is a lawn. I won’t be mowing for some time.
I grew up in the mountains in a Rocky Mountain state. It was often the first week of June before the last patch of snow melted out of the shadows in my parent’s back yard.
Solar north of about 40 degrees north latitude is not going to be economic – must be due to Evil CO2? There are places where solar for a utility is economical….Saudi Arabia could have and may have a solar farm for part of their grid.
If the corrupt governments stayed out , economics would have , and would , determine what applications are economically sustainable .
I think one of the most compelling uses for solar is rural road signs , replacing the smoky smudge pots of yore .
If government had stayed out of this business we wouldn’t be where we are today. It is that simple.
No, the subsidy-infested rooftop solar industry is all about making a highly uneconomic enterprise SEEM economic through complicated long-term leasing contracts and government mandates requiring utilities to buy the unneeded power.
Without government forcing utilities to buy the poor quality power produced when demand is lowest, there would have never been any reason for anyone to ever use a solar panel for anything connected to the grid.
Rooftop solar panels are in the same category as EVs and windfarms. Under ideal conditions they work reasonably well, but when there are departures from the normal weather patterns, their shortcomings become far more apparent than their traditional fossil fuel-powered counterparts, not the least of which are high prices. Besides, the panels must be cleaned almost weekly; otherwise, not enough light gets through to provide the advertised output. So just as EVs have numerous limitations that have to be overcome before they can expect to become more common, solar panels still have a long way to go before they can expect to be widely accepted.
Today’s problems are yesterday’s solutions.
The one thing you count on is the Party behind the mass distortions in rooftop tax credit mining, auto sector EV tax credit mining, utility sector green cred driven spending, federal agency loan and grant fraud, and NIMBY-based mfg and mining dissolution will get off completely blame free if distorted voter payoff stimulus papers over the problems.
We had a company try to sell us one of these solar systems, telling us that our monthly payment to them (for 25 years) would essentially take the place of our monthly electric bill, thanks to the credits the energy company would give us for feeding electricity into the grid. Even assuming that the panels lasted that long (and they would only provide warranties for 15 years), I didn’t see how that would benefit us financially – at best, we’d break even. Looking into the company, I found that they weren’t really selling solar panels, they were selling loans (without telling you, as noted in the article), using solar panels as the cover. They would put a lien on your property without your knowledge so that you’d have to pay off the full amount when you sold the house. The salesman was much less interested in convincing us to buy once he found out the house was paid off. With no bank holding a claim, we would have had to apply for the loan ourselves, which would have revealed the game
I get it from the preponderance of comments on here, it is virtue signaling, fake, a scam, etc. etc.
I have rooftop solar, had it since 2015 (partial then) and it didn’t produce for me what I wanted. I expanded it in 2021. Total cost in the roughly $80 K range (without the tax breaks). Before doing it I had the roof replaced d/t age so that, you could say added another $12 K to the price. Now, why? I live in the sunshine state (FL) and we have had hurricanes come through and lost power for up to a week. My wife is sick and has medical equipment and I wanted to make sure her medical needs were met in the event of another hurricane loss of power event. Well we did have one. My system is rooftop and 3 Tesla power walls for backup. Last power loss was for 16 hours (once these things begin you never know how long they will last) but we had power the whole time. Over the last 12 months we used 64 kWh over what we produced. That’s right, for a whole year we used 64 kWh. Is it a good investment… well not for an ROI, but for us for my piece of mind, yes.
Was there virtue signaling in my decision. Heck no, I don’t believe in the AGW crap one bit.
Bottom line, solar isn’t a panacea for most people, especially if you don’t live in a state where you get a lot of sunshine. I doubt I would have ever considered something like this system if I still lived in Pennsylvania where you might have to get out and remove snow and/or ice from panels.
Oh, and BTW, a generator outside wouldn’t have helped, the lot is small, no underground gas so I would’ve had to have a tank with very little space to store it and have deliveries of gas in the event of a long power outage. A relative of mine has a system like that and he has to run in once a month to make sure the system works.