The #1 Reason Why The Solar Industry Has A Trustworthiness Gap? Costs! Part Two – CleanTechnica

---

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

---

---

Our recent CleanTechnica survey revealed that consumers have concerns about the various costs connected with solar installations. In this second part of the two-part series, we explore more reasons why trustworthiness continues to plague the industry — with input from our CleanTechnica readers.

Idealistic future cost savings. Reader 6: “When I had my solar installed, the companies I got bids from gave me laughable exaggerated cost savings figures. One claimed I would save $100,000 in electricity over 10-15 years. The funny thing is I only spend $2,500-3,000 a year on electricity. So my max 10 year savings might be $30,000 if the solar generated 100% of my power. The industry is a dumpster fire, and people are getting ripped off.”

Since the earliest days of US residential solar, solar panels have gotten cheaper, and grid electricity prices have climbed up. Retail residential electricity prices in the US have mostly risen over the last decades. In 2023, prices registered a year-over-year growth of 6.3%, the highest growth registered since the beginning of the century. Residential prices continued to grow by 2% in 2024.

A lot depends on your location. The impact of electricity consumption patterns and electricity prices on summer 2025 electricity bills varied regionally. New England residential customers experienced the largest increase in average monthly electricity expenditures, with an estimated rise of $13 this summer compared with last summer. In addition to the largest increase in expenditures, the New England and West South Central regions are projected to have had the highest overall electricity bills this summer.

Finance costs hit hard. Reader 7: “The cost of installing solar and the cost of borrowing to do it versus the cost of buying electricity. Stuff you think is political usually is more about money.”

Large solar projects are typically financed by big banks. At the other end of the scale, residential solar is financed by a homeowner and potentially just through their solar company or an affiliated lender. The top 10% of American households now account for roughly half of all consumer spending. Homeownership, access to credit, and upfront capital all align with higher incomes. As CleanTechnica’s Michael Barnard reports, “The Big Beautiful Bill entrenches income and wealth inequality by heavily weighting tax relief toward affluent households while stripping back credits that supported clean energy adoption for the middle class.” This creates fragility, Barnard adds.

This equation of costs affects solar financing. The presentation and structure of “solar-specific” loans, which are often facilitated by large financial technology (“fintech”) firms via a point-of-sale partnership with solar installers, can create consumer risks, according to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. These include hidden markups and fees, misleading statements concerning federal tax credits, misrepresentations and omissions concerning “voluntary” prepayments, and misrepresentations regarding financial benefits. Federal and state regulators and law enforcement must ensure that the financing of solar energy installations is fair, transparent, and competitive.

Utility bills are hard to decipher. Reader 8: “It doesn’t help that utility bills are nearly incomprehensible.” 

Many consumers agree with this point. It’s unfortunate that the general attitude in the utility industry seems to be on profitability and nothing else. They seem to say that they have the power to decide how you use it and how much you pay for it, and that’s all that should matter. Indeed, there are plenty of people who would love to give their utility company the heave ho and generate their own electrons if they could.

Your utility meter gathers very limited data, focusing mostly on how much electricity is consumed in your home. There’s little to no information about how much your heating or cooling systems contributed to the cost, or whether your washing machine uses more energy than your clothes dryer. You’re left to your own means to figure when or how often various appliances turned on or off throughout the month. It doesn’t help that utility bills include charges for obscure items like distribution or revenue decoupling.

The solar industry must clean up its act. Reader 9: “Residential solar has a ridiculously bloated cost structure, is filled with fly-by-night local installers overpromising, overcharging, and underdelivering. The financing options are preposterously overpriced, opaque, and a bad deal. The marketing ‘lead generation’ scams that plague the industry are awful. Going onto most solar sites is like signing up to find health insurance – you will be plagued by spam calls and texts for years.”

Solar energy has become popular as an affordable way to heat, cool, and power residential homes and commercial buildings while reducing carbon footprints. Unfortunately, on occasion, con companies zero in to steal personal and financial information, money, and even identities from consumers who are interested in solar energy. The US Federal Trade Commission says that, while reputable companies can help you save costs with clean or solar energy improvements, scammers offer more than they can deliver. To protect yourself from clean energy scams:

• Know that “free” or “no cost” solar panel offers are scams.
• Take your time, as anyone who pressures you into a contract or demands up-front or immediate payment is a scammer.
• Protect your personal information.

Costs can be mitigated by more robust emphasis on battery storage. Reader 10: “Solar itself is doing great! The solar installation industry, especially the big players, are not trustworthy. The big ones just have too many corporate parasites to feed so work to charge the most. Smaller ones are all kinds from bad to great. One thing I’ve hated about them is keeping batteries at $900/kwh when their cost was 30% of that. It was and still is so high; lead batteries were far better. Now one can buy well shopped certified batteries under $200/kwh.”

This is an often underreported but important point. An evolution is taking place in which battery pack costs are becoming more and more affordable. Once they are cheap enough and ubiquitous enough, consumers with the most resources will exit the grid first. Our pals over at Canary Media, in cooperation with EnergySage, have put together a helpful guide that lists seven questions every homeowner needs to ask before making a decision to add a residential storage battery to their home.

1. How much stored energy, or capacity, do you need?
2. What appliances do you want to back up?
3. How much flexibility do you want?
4. What other battery system hardware might you need?
5. What type of battery should I get?
6. Does the battery system you are interested in have a good warranty?
7. Where will you put your battery system?

Final Thoughts

The US Energy Administration’s Short-Term Energy Outlook concludes that US renewable capacity additions, especially solar, will continue to drive the growth of US power generation over the next two years.

In his new book, Here Comes the Sun, climate activist Bill McKibben explains that “sometime in the early part of the 2020s we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel. That’s not common knowledge.”

Solar is part of the renewable energy toolkit that allows us to shut off the poison of fossil fuels and return to the Earth’s natural rhythms. I’m doing so, we can be assured of a future in which we are healthy and thrive as one part of a very large and complex interconnected ecosystem. Yes, we’ll have to endure some growing pains with solar as costs fluctuate, but the sunlit future is very bright.