Christina Mathieson Segura | Real Estate Education
Nobody Is Suing the Installers Anymore
What Five State Attorneys General, One Liquidation, and a $5 Million Judgment Worth Nothing Tell Us About Where Solar Risk Actually Lives
On August 7, 2026, a judge in Wilmington signed an order and Freedom Forever stopped being a company that could be saved.
The Chapter 11 case was converted to Chapter 7. Alfred T. Giuliano was appointed trustee. A week earlier, the unsecured creditors' committee had rejected a proposed sale of the business to its own chief executive, no qualified outside bid came in, and the company told the court there was no money left to run the case.
Roughly 190,000 households have Freedom Forever panels on the roof.
Those households did nothing on August 7. They did not get a letter. Their payments came out on schedule. Somewhere in a file cabinet or a cloud drive, each of them holds a workmanship warranty issued by an entity that now exists only as an estate being wound down by a trustee.
In April, when Freedom Forever filed, I wrote that the story was not really about one company. Four months later I can be more specific than that. This is not a story about a company failing. It is a story about an obligation falling through floors.
This brief updates work first published in April 2026. It is written for homeowners, REALTORS®, and anyone trying to understand how residential solar risk actually moves. It is educational. It is not legal advice and I am not your attorney. Every factual claim is sourced at the end.
PART ONE: THE DESCENT
Floor One: The Homeowner
Start here because the homeowner is the only party in this story who cannot move.
They signed once. The panels are bolted to a roof they own. The payment leaves the account on the same day every month regardless of what happens to anyone else in the chain. They cannot restructure. They cannot convert to Chapter 7. They cannot sell the obligation to a servicer and walk away.
Everyone above them can do all of those things, and over the last three years, nearly all of them have.
Floor Two: The Installer
The company that knocked on the door is usually the first one gone.
Titan Solar Power shut down in June 2024. SunPower filed Chapter 11 in August 2024 and its Blue Raven brand and dealer network went to Complete Solaria, so a different and smaller company now uses the SunPower name. Lumio filed in September 2024 and its assets went to Zeo Energy that November. Sunnova filed in June 2025. PosiGen filed in late 2025 and wound down. Vision Solar filed. Solar Wolf Energy filed. And Freedom Forever, second in the country by market share in 2025 at 6.1%, filed in April 2026 and converted to liquidation in August.
That is the shape of it.
Not a list of unlucky companies.
A layer of the industry that has substantially stopped existing.
Here is what most homeowners get wrong about that, and it is worth being precise. Manufacturer warranties survive. If Enphase made the inverter or Qcells made the panels, those companies are still there and those warranties are still enforceable directly against them. What does not survive is everything the installer promised in its own name: the workmanship warranty, the roof penetration coverage, the production guarantee, the free service visits.
Freedom Forever's own filing said no funds would be available for distribution to unsecured creditors after administrative expenses were paid. Homeowners with warranty claims sit in the unsecured class.
The warranty is not reduced. It is not delayed. It is worth what the estate can pay, and the estate has told the court what that is.
Floor Three: The Financier
When the installer disappears, the payment does not.
It goes to a different company entirely, and for a long time the industry treated that as a feature.
Then the financiers started failing too.
Sunlight Financial filed in October 2023 and was acquired. Solar Mosaic, which financed more than 500,000 home solar systems, filed Chapter 11 in June 2025. Its plan was approved that September and its servicing moved to Solar Servicing LLC, a subsidiary of Forbright Bank, in a transaction that closed on September 22, 2025.
Read Mosaic's own announcement of that transfer and you will find the sentence that defines this entire industry: no changes to payment terms or schedules for borrowers.
The company that lent the money went through bankruptcy. The obligation did not move an inch.
And Mosaic is not a bystander in the rest of this brief. It is a named defendant in the Minnesota Attorney General's 2024 action against solar lenders. It is a named defendant in the New York Attorney General's March 2026 action. It was owed roughly $114 million by Freedom Forever at the time of that company's filing.
One entity, three appearances, none of them good.
Floor Four: The Servicer
This is the newest floor and the one almost nobody is watching.
When an installer or a financier fails, somebody has to keep the books, send the bills, answer the phone, and handle the transfer when a house sells. That somebody is a servicer, and the homeowner never chose them, never signed anything with them, and in many cases has never heard of them.
Spruce Power acquired a portfolio of solar contracts from NRG Energy. SunStrong Management now services loans, leases, and power purchase agreements inherited from the bankrupt Sunnova and SunPower. Solar Servicing LLC holds the Mosaic book. Renewbrook, a Brookfield subsidiary, took the majority of PosiGen's residential portfolio.
None of these companies sold anybody solar. All of them now hold the relationship.
And here is the part that should concentrate the mind of anyone who thought the bottom floor was safe: that is where the regulators are now.
PART TWO: THE ENFORCEMENT MAP
State attorneys general did not stumble onto the servicing layer.
They walked down the same staircase the money did, one floor at a time, over four years.
You can watch it happen.
2022 to 2024: They sued the installer
Connecticut opened with Solar Wolf Energy in 2022, an investigation and enforcement action with the Department of Consumer Protection over work that was never completed or never begun. Solar Wolf was barred from doing business in the state and later filed for bankruptcy.
In 2023, Connecticut sued Vision Solar over high-pressure sales tactics, misrepresented financing and tax credit details, and unpermitted work. Florida and Connecticut both brought actions that year alleging high-pressure sales, unaffordable financing, and misleading statements about savings and tax credits.
In July 2024, Connecticut sued Sunrun, Sunrun Installation Services, two of its marketing and installation subcontractors, and two individual salespeople by name. The complaint alleges violations of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act and the Home Improvement Act, and describes forged signatures, impersonation of consumers, unpermitted work, and systems installed that never functioned. In one instance the Attorney General has publicly described salespeople forging a homeowner's voice, possibly by computer, to satisfy a verbal confirmation.
Sit with that for a second. Not a forged signature on a page. A forged human voice, used to defeat the one safeguard designed to confirm that a real person actually agreed.
2024 to 2026:
They moved to the lender
In March 2024, Minnesota sued four of the largest solar lenders in the country, alleging they concealed roughly $35 million in dealer fees inside loans covering more than 5,000 purchases, and that those hidden fees increased the cost of a system by 15 to 30 percent. The companies deny wrongdoing and the litigation continues.
In August 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published findings that solar lenders were burying markup fees that often increase loan costs by 30 percent or more above the cash price, and issued a joint consumer advisory with the Treasury Department and the Federal Trade Commission.
Then in March 2026, New York sued a residential solar company, its two chief executives, and its two lending partners, over what the state estimates was nearly $275 million taken from New Yorkers across more than 4,500 systems. The complaint alleges inflated prices, fees hidden inside those prices, government incentives that did not exist, and signatures captured on tablets from consumers who were told they were signing something else. The state is seeking to void the agreements, including the lenders' agreements.
That is the pivot. Not a lawsuit against a seller with a lending partner mentioned in passing. A lawsuit that names the money.
2026: They arrived at the servicer
On March 17, 2026, Connecticut announced two things at once.
The first was a $100,000 settlement with Spruce Power 3, resolving an investigation triggered by complaints about billing, customer service, and warranty issues. The Attorney General's own account of why those complaints happened is the most useful sentence a real estate professional will read this year: the complaints peaked when Spruce acquired a portfolio of contracts and was, in the state's words, "ill-prepared to manage the transition."
A state Attorney General, describing a portfolio transfer failure as the harm.
The second was a civil investigative demand issued to SunStrong Management on February 27, 2026, after roughly 65 complaints to the Attorney General and the Department of Consumer Protection jointly. The demand seeks records regarding the transfer of systems from the bankrupt Sunnova and SunPower to SunStrong, quality control monitoring, contracts, and consumer complaints.
Among the allegations: that SunStrong charges homeowners a $10 monthly fee to receive production data from the solar system on their own roof.
The road not taken: Texas built a license instead
Texas went a different direction and it is worth watching.
Senate Bill 1036, authored by Senator Judith Zaffirini of Laredo, created Chapter 1806 of the Texas Occupations Code, the Residential Solar Retailer Regulatory Act. The first phase, effective September 1, 2025, required specific contract provisions, disclosures, and a five business day right to cancel. The second phase took effect September 1, 2026: residential solar retailers and individual salespersons must now register with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, and the statute's prohibited acts became enforceable through administrative action.
There is now a free public registry a homeowner can search.
Two honest caveats. As of the day before the mandate took effect, TDLR had told ABC13's 13 Investigates that 18 retailers and about 500 salespersons had registered, in one of the largest residential solar markets in the country. Registration opened August 10, so that is three weeks of uptake, and an absent name is a question rather than a conclusion.
And the Act does not cover power purchase agreements at all.
Not partially.
Two homeowners on the same street, with identical panels sold by the same person on the same afternoon, end up in different legal universes. The one who signed a loan or a lease gets a registry, a code of conduct, a cancellation right, and a complaint path.
The one who signed a PPA gets none of it.
Separately, Texas is also investigating
On April 3, 2026, the Texas Attorney General announced an initiative targeting fraudulent and deceptive practices in residential solar and issued civil investigative demands to four companies, citing more than 100 formal complaints. The demands seek documentation on how companies substantiate energy savings claims, along with warranties, marketing materials, and contract terms.
Twelve days later, one of the four named companies filed for bankruptcy.
PART THREE: THE PROOF, AND IT IS ONE CASE
Everything above is a pattern. This next part is the pattern with a number attached, and it happened to a single company's customers.
Connecticut sued Vision Solar and won. In 2024 a Hartford Superior Court judge imposed a $5 million stipulated judgment over high-pressure sales tactics, misrepresentations, delays, and unpermitted work.
Read what the Attorney General's office says about that judgment in its own March 2026 release: because Vision Solar has filed for bankruptcy, the company will not have sufficient assets to pay it.
The state won five million dollars and the homeowners got nothing.
Then the office did something else. It opened investigations into Vision Solar's financing partners, and in 2025 it reached a settlement with the largest one, Dividend Finance, requiring the lender to provide relief to Vision Solar borrowers who were defrauded. Investigations into the other financing partners are ongoing.
Same installer.
Same conduct.
The judgment against the seller bought nothing and the money came from the lender.
And now the other half, which cuts the opposite way
While Connecticut was reaching that settlement, other Vision Solar borrowers were in federal court.
In Migliore v. Vision Solar, the Third Circuit held in a precedential opinion that a solar finance company is not vicariously liable for the deceptive acts of an independent dealer. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on June 15, 2026, under the caption Migliore v. Sunlight Financial.
So consider two homeowners, both sold by Vision Solar, both defrauded in substantially the same way.
One had Dividend as a financing partner and a state Attorney General who went after that lender. That homeowner got relief.
One had Sunlight Financial and went to federal court on a theory of vicarious liability. That homeowner lost, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
Same bankrupt installer.
Same fraud.
Two different financing partners, two different doors, two opposite outcomes.
Nothing about the homeowner's conduct or the seller's conduct explains the difference.
What explains the difference is which entity was behind the loan and whether a state chose to pursue it.
That is the most instructive pair of outcomes in this entire subject, and it is why the enforcement map matters more than any single bankruptcy.
PART FOUR: WHAT THE COMPLAINTS ACTUALLY DESCRIBE
This is not a general warning about high-pressure sales. Every item below appears in a state Attorney General filing, a regulator's published findings, or a public enforcement announcement.
Signatures captured on tablets by consumers who were told they were signing an application or a credit check rather than a binding agreement.
Government incentives and rebates described in the sales pitch that did not exist. Dealer fees buried inside the system price, adding 15 to 30 percent in one state's allegations and 30 percent or more according to the CFPB.
Elderly and non-English-speaking homeowners told they were enrolling in a utility or government program.
Forged signatures.
Impersonation of consumers.
A forged voice.
Systems installed without permits.
Systems installed, never activated, and billed anyway, with the company refusing to remove them.
Escalator clauses that were never explained, so a payment quoted at one number climbs for twenty-five years.
And a lead-generation layer feeding all of it, where Connecticut settled with a referral site for $20,000 over false claims made on social media.
All of that. In public filings. In four years.
The common thread is not that the technology fails. Sometimes it works fine. The common thread is that the paperwork does something different from what the conversation described, and the paperwork is what survives.
PART FIVE: THE MODEL NOBODY HAS TESTED YET
The 25D residential solar tax credit expired for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. Leased and third-party-owned systems can still access the commercial investment tax credit under 48E, which itself expires at the end of 2027.
That single change reorganized the market.
Aurora Solar's 2026 Snapshot, its fourth annual report, drawing on surveys of 1,112 homeowners and more than 600 solar professionals conducted in early 2026, found that 55% of installers now say third-party ownership is their most popular financing option, ahead of loans at 17% and cash at 16%. Sixty-five percent of sales professionals expect more than half of their 2026 projects to use TPO, up from 44% the year before. The share of salespeople selling no TPO at all fell from 9% to 1%.
That is not a trend.
That is the market changing shape.
And inside that shift is a newer product still: the prepaid lease. The homeowner pays up front, uses the system without a monthly payment, and can buy it outright after roughly five or six years instead of waiting out a twenty-five year term.
So what happens when that homeowner sells the house in year two?
A staff product manager at Aurora Solar was asked exactly that by Solar Power World in April 2026. Her answer, on the record: "I don't know. It's very different than 15 years before your buyout terms."
I want to be fair to her, because that is an honest answer and honest answers are in short supply here. She also noted she has not seen many examples yet, which is true, and that a standard lease has a transfer process, which is also true.
But hold it next to what the industry is doing. Two-thirds of sales professionals expect most of their volume this year to be third-party owned. Prepaid leases are being sold in at least nine states. And the person whose job is to build the financing product cannot yet say what happens at the moment a house changes hands.
One more thing worth knowing, from Solar United Neighbors' April 2026 consumer guide: because a prepaid lease is paid up front, the homeowner may have less financial leverage over the provider if the system underperforms. In a monthly lease, withholding is at least conceivable. When the money is already gone, it is not.
New product.
Untested transfer.
Reduced leverage.
Sold at scale.
PART SIX: THE HONEST ACCOUNTING
I am not going to write a version of this that ends in reassurance.
Solar is not the problem. A well-designed, well-installed, well-documented system on the right roof is a good asset and I have said so for fifteen years. This brief is not an argument against solar and anyone who reads it that way has misread it.
But the industry optimized for one moment and ignored another. It solved origination brilliantly. Financing, sales, adoption, volume. It never had to solve the exit, because in the early years almost nobody was exiting. Real estate runs on transferability, clarity, and marketability. Those two systems were never aligned, and they collide inside a transaction, at the worst possible moment, with the highest possible stakes.
The people holding the consequences did nothing wrong.
They answered a door.
They wanted a lower bill and a smaller footprint.
They signed a document a salesperson told them was routine.
The failure was structural and it was above them.
And documentation does not fix any of it. A perfect file does not make a bankrupt installer honor a workmanship warranty. It does not restore a production guarantee. It does not put a servicer on the phone. What a file does is smaller than what anyone wants it to do: it makes the problem legible early enough to price, disclose, and negotiate. Legible is not solved. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
The industry solved how to sell these systems and never solved what happens next. We are passing on problems people are not trained to see.
PART SEVEN: WHAT HOMEOWNERS NEED TO KNOW NOW
Keep paying. Your obligation does not disappear because the installer did. Leases, PPAs, and loans are assets in a bankruptcy. They get transferred to a servicer and that servicer enforces the terms exactly as written. Stopping payment on the strength of a sales call from a company promising to cancel your contract is the fastest way to turn a bad situation into a default.
Build the file today, not when you list. Original contract and every addendum. Financing disclosures. Warranty paperwork. Interconnection agreement. Permit packet. Equipment data sheets. Production history from the monitoring app. Utility bills from before and after. Physical and digital.
Find out who actually holds your obligation right now. Not who sold it to you. Ask in writing and keep the answer.
Check for a UCC filing, and check in both places. Requirements vary by state, but a fixture filing and a personal property filing are often recorded in different offices. Your title company or a real estate attorney can run both. If you are planning to sell, resolve this before you list, not after you are under contract with a rate lock running.
Go directly to the manufacturer for equipment problems. Enphase, SolarEdge, Qcells, REC and others support their own products independently of whoever installed them. Document every contact.
Use the free channels. Your state Attorney General's consumer protection division. The CFPB at consumerfinance.gov/complaint. The FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. In Texas, TDLR. These do not usually resolve an individual dispute, but they build the record regulators act on, and as this brief demonstrates, regulators are acting.
Be careful who you hire to help. A second industry has grown up around this one, selling contract cancellation and settlement claims to people who feel trapped. Some are legitimate consumer protection firms. Many are marketing operations. Confirm there is an attorney, licensed in your state, before you pay anyone anything. Read that article here.
PART EIGHT: WHAT REALTORS® NEED TO KNOW NOW
Solar is not an amenity line in the remarks. It is a structure attached to the property with a financing instrument attached to it, and it has to be understood before it becomes a problem rather than after.
Every solar listing deserves the same five questions. What kind of agreement is this: owned, financed, leased, or a PPA? Who holds that agreement today, as opposed to who sold it? What does the transfer process actually require, in writing, with a timeline? Is there a UCC filing, and has anyone searched both possible offices? And what happens if the company behind any of it no longer exists?
Ask before you price it. A financed system may contribute nothing to appraised value depending on how the financing documents read and what a UCC search returns. Finding that out during underwriting instead of during your listing appointment is how deals fall apart.
Get the transfer started early. Whatever the process is, it is slower than you think, and it is slower still when a servicer inherited the contract from a bankrupt predecessor.
Do not diagnose. You are not the attorney and you are not the one who undoes a contract. Your job is to know enough to ask the right questions, to document the answers, and to know when to bring in someone who can actually resolve it.
You do not need to be a solar expert.
You do need to stop treating solar as somebody else's problem, because when it surfaces three days before closing, it becomes yours.
THE MISSION
I wrote Solar Agreements in Real Estate and The Solar SOS for exactly this. Not as textbooks. As field guides, for the professionals and homeowners sitting in the middle of something complicated who need someone to explain what they are looking at.
In April I asked what would happen to Freedom Forever's customers. On August 7 a judge answered. That is the pattern this industry keeps producing, and it will keep producing it until somebody makes the exit as well understood as the sale.
The company that made the promise is gone.
The company collecting the payment is not.
The panels are not going anywhere.
Neither am I.
If you are navigating a solar-complicated transaction, reach out. If you want to understand these agreements before they become a problem, start with the books. If you want this education for your brokerage, your association, or your market, I am available.
Document.
I am Christina Mathieson Segura. I teach innovation, consumer protection, and ethical AI across real estate and beyond, including the solar industry and its fallout on real estate transactions, and I write about how people and businesses use new technology without losing the judgment that makes them worth trusting.
Reach me at Hello@ChristinaEducation.com.
Books referenced
Solar Agreements in Real Estate:
Paperback ISBN 979-8-9950927-3-5 | Digital ISBN 979-8-9950927-4-2
ISBN 979-8-9950927-9-7
Published by NonBlonde Media
SOURCES
All sources verified September 1, 2026.
Freedom Forever bankruptcy
Kroll Restructuring Administration, official claims agent, Case No. 26-10522, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Petition April 15, 2026; affiliates Freedom Forever Pennsylvania LLC and Freedom Forever Procurement LLC filed May 2, 2026; Hon. Brendan L. Shannon; bid deadline July 27, 2026 with insider bids due July 24; auction July 28; sale hearing July 31; conversion to Chapter 7 effective August 7, 2026; Alfred T. Giuliano appointed trustee.
https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FreedomForever/
pv magazine USA, "Residential solar company Freedom Forever files chapter 11 bankruptcy," April 15, 2026. Market share and Wood Mackenzie ranking.
Solar Power World, "Residential solar installer Freedom Forever files bankruptcy," April 15, 2026.
Bloomberg Law, "Freedom Forever to Liquidate After Insider Sale Effort Collapse," August 4, 2026.
Connecticut enforcement
Office of the Attorney General, "Attorney General Tong Announces New Developments to Hold Solar Industry Accountable," March 17, 2026. Spruce Power 3 settlement, SunStrong civil investigative demand, Vision Solar judgment, Dividend Finance settlement, Solar Wolf, EnergyBillCruncher.
Office of the Attorney General, "Attorney General Tong Sues SunRun," July 2024.
https://portal.ct.gov/ag/press-releases/2024-press-releases/attorney-general-tong-sues-sunrun
New York enforcement
Office of the New York State Attorney General, press release, March 17, 2026.
Federal findings
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "Issue Spotlight: Solar Financing," August 7, 2024, and joint consumer advisory with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Federal Trade Commission.
https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/research-reports/issue-spotlight-solar-financing/
Texas
Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, Residential Solar Retailers program.
https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/solar/solar.htm
Texas Occupations Code Chapter 1806, Residential Solar Retailer Regulatory Act (SB 1036, 89th Legislature).
Office of the Texas Attorney General, residential solar initiative announced April 3, 2026.
https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/
KTRK ABC13 Houston, 13 Investigates, September 1, 2026, TDLR-provided registration figures.
https://abc13.com/post/new-solar-panel-laws-are-huge-win-consumer-advocate-says/19771315/
Third Circuit
Migliore v. Vision Solar LLC, No. 24-1679, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, precedential.
https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/241679p.pdf
Supreme Court of the United States, Order List, June 15, 2026, certiorari denied in Migliore v. Sunlight Financial LLC, No. 25-1194.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/061526zor_5if6.pdf
Market data
Aurora Solar, 2026 Aurora Solar Snapshot, published March 24, 2026. Surveys of 1,112 homeowners and more than 600 solar professionals.
https://aurorasolar.com/aurora-solar-snapshot/
Solar Power World, Billy Ludt, "Prepaid leases provide pathway to home-owned solar projects," April 16, 2026. Jess Lyons quotation, 25D and 48E, Solar United Neighbors consumer guide.
Financier restructuring
Solar Mosaic Chapter 11, filed June 6, 2025, Southern District of Texas; plan approved September 2025; servicing transferred to Solar Servicing LLC, a subsidiary of Forbright Bank, closing September 22, 2025.
Minnesota
Office of the Minnesota Attorney General, action against four solar lenders, filed March 8, 2024.
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