What Happens When Your Solar Installer Goes Bankrupt: PosiGen, Sunnova, and Your Options

One of the harder conversations I’ve had with clients in the past 18 months: explaining what happens when the company that put solar on their roof — and that they’re paying $130 a month to for the next 22 years — files for bankruptcy protection. It’s not a hypothetical anymore. Two large residential solar lease/PPA companies that operated in NJ have gone through financial distress events in 2025–2026, and the contractual mechanics for affected homeowners are not what most people assume.

The recent NJ track record

I’ll lead with the public record:

• PosiGen — February 2026 transition. PosiGen, a Louisiana-based lease/PPA provider that operated in NJ since 2018, restructured under a creditor agreement and transferred its NJ servicing portfolio to a successor servicer. NJ homeowners on PosiGen leases received an assumption-and-assignment notice. Monthly payment terms were preserved. Warranty servicing was reassigned to the successor.
• Sunnova / SunStrong — ongoing. Sunnova, a publicly-traded residential solar provider, filed Chapter 11 in 2025; portions of its lease/PPA portfolio (including the NJ portion) have been sold to SunStrong Capital Services. Existing customer contracts were assumed under the sale order. SunStrong now handles billing and Tier-1 service.

(Sources: Sunnova SEC filings; PosiGen public corporate notices; NJ Division of Consumer Affairs filings.)

What actually changes for the homeowner

In a Chapter 11 reorganization or an asset-sale scenario for a solar provider, your contract becomes one of the assets the trustee or successor company has to dispose of. The standard outcomes:

1. The contract gets assumed by the successor servicer

This is the most common case. Your lease or PPA contract is assigned to a new company. The terms — monthly payment, escalator, term length, transfer-on-sale provisions — all stay the same. You get an assumption-and-assignment notice telling you who to send payments to going forward. This happened to most PosiGen customers in NJ in early 2026.

2. The contract gets rejected

Rare for solar leases (the income stream is too valuable to throw away), but possible. If your contract is rejected, you keep the panels on your roof but the obligation to pay terminates. You’re then responsible for any maintenance, repairs, and SREC paperwork going forward — which can be a meaningful cost if the inverter or panels fail.

3. Warranty support degrades

This is the one homeowners feel the most. The original installer’s workmanship warranty (typically 10–25 years covering roof leaks, racking issues, electrical defects from the install itself) almost never transfers cleanly to a successor servicer. They’ll typically take over service-call dispatch but the warranty coverage gets quieter.

The manufacturer warranties (panel performance, inverter performance) generally do survive, because those are between you and the manufacturer (LG, REC, Enphase, SolarEdge, Tesla) — not between you and the installer. So your panels are still under their 25-year power output warranty.

What changes for different contract types

If you’re already in this situation

What to do, in order:

1. Read your assumption-and-assignment notice carefully. It will tell you (a) who the successor servicer is, (b) where to send payments going forward, (c) where to direct warranty calls, and (d) the deadline for objecting (typically 30 days from notice).
2. Save every document related to your install. Original contract, system specs, inverter and panel serial numbers, any warranty certificates. Manufacturer warranties are claimed via serial number — you’ll need that data when the installer’s not around to look it up for you.
3. Verify your SREC stream. If your SRECs were being aggregated through the original installer, check that the successor is still pushing them to PJM GATS under your system’s account. This is the #1 thing that quietly breaks in transitions, and the only way you’ll catch it is by logging into your GATS account and checking that new certificates are showing up.
4. Document the system’s pre-transition condition. Walk the roof (or have a roofer do it). Photograph any visible wear, racking, conduit. If the workmanship warranty turns out to be unrecoverable later, you’ll want a record of where things stood at the moment of transition.

How to evaluate installer financial stability before signing

This is the broker’s job, but if you’re shopping direct, here’s the checklist I use:

• Public 10-K and 10-Q filings — for publicly-traded installers (Sunnova, Sunrun, NextEra), pull the most recent quarterly filing from SEC EDGAR. Look at: net income (positive vs. negative), operating cash flow, long-term debt, and any going-concern language from the auditors. A residential solar provider burning cash with negative operating cash flow and rising debt is a flag.
• BBB rating and complaint volume — a sudden spike in BBB complaints is often the first public signal of operational stress.
• NJ Division of Consumer Affairs filings — search the NJ DCA database for the installer’s name. Active consumer-protection actions or open complaints are public record.
• Years in business — the residential solar industry has a high churn rate. An installer with 10+ years of operation and continuous NJ presence is statistically more stable than a 2-year-old company growing fast on lead-gen spend.
• Concentration risk — if an installer is doing 90% of their business in one financing partner’s product (e.g., one lease company), and that financing partner gets into trouble, the installer often follows. Diversified installers ride out individual partner failures better.

I run this checklist on every installer in my referral pool, every quarter. It’s the unsexy part of brokering — but it’s why none of my clients in 2024 or 2025 were in the PosiGen NJ pool that got transitioned in February 2026.

The broker advantage on this specific risk

Honest disclosure: this is one of the strongest arguments for working with a broker, and I’m aware that’s self-serving. The mechanics:

• I refresh my installer roster monthly based on financial-stability data.
• When an installer’s BBB complaint volume rises, I pause new referrals to them before I see them in the news.
• I keep written records of which installers I’ve removed and why — clients can see that list (I share it on request).
• If a client’s installer later runs into trouble, I help them navigate the assumption-and-assignment process — even though the referral fee for that install was paid out years earlier and I have no further commercial interest.

A direct-to-installer sale, by contrast, leaves you fully exposed. The salesperson who closed you is rarely the one you’ll be calling four years later when something changes.

Bottom line, in plain English

An installer going bankrupt usually doesn’t mean losing your panels or your contract. It does mean a quieter warranty experience, a worse customer-service desk, and a real chance that something will quietly break — usually SREC aggregation — that nobody tells you about. If you already have a lease or PPA with a company in trouble, read the assumption-and-assignment notice and verify your SREC stream. If you’re shopping new in 2026, financial-stability vetting is part of the due diligence — whether you do it yourself or work with a broker who does it for you.