After being a renter for many, many years, I bought a house in June. I know I am very lucky to be able to buy a house, but man, does it feel like homeownership is a scam. You give away your life savings for the privilege of paying to fix everything in your house when it breaks, which it definitely will. There were leased solar panels on the roof of our house when we bought it, which we thought, at the time, was a plus. It turns out we were very wrong. Read more in my latest story:
Rooftop Solar Power Has a Dark Side
Long story short, we paid $6,000 to split the cost of the rest of the solar lease with the previous owners so we’d continue to get solar power. We could have just paid a monthly fee but it was a bad deal so we wanted the previous owners to pay for some of it, hence the prepaying the lease. We eventually found that although the company, Spruce Power, had taken our money and told us the panels were working, they had actually been disconnected in 2019.
Yes, I should have Googled more about the company before we agreed to take over the lease, but when you are spending many times $6,000 on a house, you don’t think too hard about the solar panels that are supposedly working on the roof. Besides, solar is always good, right? Save the planet! Save the whales! It turns out that Spruce Power, the company that owns our panels, has a lot of unhappy customers. Customers who say their systems haven’t worked in years. Customers who say they receive bills on the last day of the month that are due on the first day of the month. Who even allege that Spruce makes up the amount of power it is charging them for. Which is certainly possible because do you know how much electricity you are using, or consuming, on a daily basis?
Even worse, there are lots of solar companies with similarly bad reputations. I read one complaint that alleged that the company installed panels and then went out of business, and then the panels caused the roof to sag, and eventually fall in on the people who thought they were being good citizens by getting solar.
Of course, not all solar is bad, and from the volume of complaints I’ve gotten from industry representatives who only want me to say good things about solar, if we say anything negative about solar panels, the world might explode. What’s perhaps most interesting to me about my situation is that it’s caused, in part, by the financialization of solar leases, which got my economics reporter brain interested. Remember the Great Recession that was caused by banks packaging and selling mortgage-backed securities and underestimating just how risky those securities were? Now, people are buying and selling packages of solar leases, and that apparently has contributed to some bad outcomes. Bankers who own the leases find it more valuable to collect the revenue without investing in upkeep and maintenance of the panels. And panels are apparently performing worse than analysts had expected.
You may remember that I also wrote about getting a bad deal at the car dealership, where sketchy dealers charged me for VIN etching that they didn’t actually do and also charged me over MSRP. This plus my solar experience makes me think that we are living in an age of scams. The Connecticut Attorney General told me, and I quote, “We are living in an age of scams.” So I want to know — what are the other scams or bad deals you see as consumers? My DMs are open!
Read more of my solar story here:
Rooftop Solar Power Has a Dark Side
And see a “fun” chart I made from data provided by the FTC after I FOIA’d the number of people filing complaints about solar panels, by year:
I also had a story about how the trucking bubble has burst, leaving people stranded who joined the industry when there was a false narrative of a driver shortage. Here’s that story:
Lastly, Books to Fall Asleep To (BFAT): (If you are new here, I end the newsletter with a book that is quite interesting but also quite soothing that I use to help me fall asleep at night.) How to Hide An Empire by Daniel Immerwahr. I think all Americans know the irony of us celebrating breaking away from the British and then turning around and essentially colonizing a lot of places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. This book is a snappy and detailed explanation of all the times we have done that, and what happened after. I did not know that the U.S. “owned” the Philippines from like 1898 to 1946, but there are lots of details in here about stuff that I did not know. I also wonder how much of the U.S. not letting new places be states is that they can’t conceptualize how they would put more than 50 stars on a flag.