How to Get Out of a Solar PPA

First, make sure this is your page

A PPA is sold as cheaper electricity with nothing to buy. What it does is commit you to buying power from one company, at a rate that company set, for as long as twenty-five years, with no automatic ownership at the end. Leases and PPAs get lumped together because they share a shape: a company owns the panels, you own nothing, and you signed something long. The exits look alike. The arithmetic differs, and people trying to work out what they owe get this wrong constantly.

This test takes ten seconds.

A lease charges you for the equipment. A fixed monthly fee for the use of a system on your roof. Treasury says that for the life of that contract you are entitled to use all the power the system produces. If your bill is the same number every month regardless of the weather, you have a lease, and the lease page is yours.

A PPA charges you for electricity. Treasury describes it as an arrangement where an operating company installs a system on your property and you agree to purchase the electricity it produces for a period of time at a rate that is generally cheaper than what your utility would charge. You pay for power costs only, without system usage fees. Treasury adds a detail that surprises people: under a PPA you are not automatically entitled to all the power the system produces.

If your statement carries a rate and a number of kilowatt-hours, you are in the right place.

The escalator works differently here, and worse

On a lease, an escalator raises a fixed monthly fee. You can at least read next year’s bill off this year’s.

On a PPA it raises the price of every unit you buy, for as long as the company can keep you. The CFPB found that in some PPA contracts the rate is fixed for the whole agreement, while in others there are delineated escalators that increase the rate in future years, ranging from 1 to 5 percent. Typical PPA lengths run six to twenty-five years.

Compound a per-kilowatt-hour rate across twenty years and the line crosses. The pitch was built on the gap between the PPA rate and your utility rate in year one. Whether that gap survives to year fifteen depends on your escalator racing your utility’s increases, and the salesperson at your kitchen table could not have known what either would do.

Treasury gives you the check the salesperson skipped: check your current utility bill for the cost per kilowatt-hour, compare it to the cost shown on the PPA, and look for descriptions of how the PPA costs can change in the future. Do that with the escalated rate, not the first-year rate.

The routes out, free ones first

The company that owns your panels would like you to believe the buyout is your only option, because that is the route where it names the price. Four routes come before it, and none of them cost you anything.

1. Cancel inside the window

Cost: nothing. Treasury tells PPA signers that the right to cancel the transaction lasts for at least three days from the date it is signed. Underneath sits 16 CFR 429.1 and its third-business-day deadline for a sale solicited at your home for $25 or more. Your contract may allow longer, often until permitting. If you signed this week, go to the cancellation page now and send the notice before anyone calls to schedule your install.

2. Non-performance

Cost: nothing to start. A PPA is a promise to deliver electricity. If the system was never energized, or produces well under what the agreement describes, the company is billing you for a product it has not delivered. That is your claim to press.

Treasury tells PPA signers to ask whether the contract includes a performance guaranty and how the company will pay if the system does not produce the minimum amount of power, and what recourse they have to cease payment if the system is not repaired or replaced in a timely manner. Go find those clauses, then write to whoever bills you with the dates and the production figures.

Connecticut’s file shows what this looks like at scale: roughly 65 complaints to the attorney general and the Department of Consumer Protection after SunStrong took over servicing, covering failure to uphold warranties, unresponsiveness, and a $10 monthly fee to receive data about the system’s own production. A company charging you to see whether it delivered what you bought is itself worth writing down.

3. Complain, free

Cost: nothing. Treasury’s advisory sends solar consumers to the FTC, the CFPB and their state consumer protection office. The Connecticut investigation started as complaint volume, and so did Minnesota’s case and Michigan’s.

4. Transfer at sale

Cost: closing friction. Your buyer inherits the problem only after the company approves them, because the buyer has to qualify with the counterparty and assume the agreement. Treasury tells signers to ask up front what happens if they want to leave the contract or sell the house, and whether an early termination penalty applies. Mechanics on the selling page.

5. Buyout

Cost: real money. Your agreement has a buyout provision and no statute governs the price. Treasury’s end-of-term language is the warning: at the end of the PPA you will not automatically own the system, and you will need to purchase it from the company at “fair market value.” The counterparty sets that figure and gets paid it. The same logic runs an early buyout, so get the quote in writing, ask how it was built, and do not accept a number the company refuses to explain. The buyout page shows the arithmetic and the cost calculator compares it against staying.

6. Stop paying

Cost: your credit, and more. The company holding your PPA is set up to collect, and this is the route where it holds the stronger position. Read the consequences on their own page first.

Bankruptcy changes the envelope, not the obligation

PPA holders ask this more than anyone, because the third-party ownership model is where the failures landed, leaving homeowners holding contracts with companies that changed hands.

Sunnova filed Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, Case No. 25-90160. On July 31, 2025, the court approved the sale of substantially all of its assets and business operations, with SunStrong Management taking over servicing of solar and storage systems. The plan was confirmed in November 2025 and core operations sit under Solaris Assets.

What that means for you is narrow, and you deserve a straight answer. Your agreement survived. The right to collect on it survived and moved. The service standard behind it is the open question, which is exactly what Connecticut is asking about. A bankruptcy does not cancel your PPA. A company that calls offering to void it because the original counterparty failed is a solar cancellation outfit selling you something a court already decided. That is the second wave of this industry: it finds people the first company left stranded and charges them for an exit that does not exist. Detail on the bankruptcy page.

One thing a PPA never gives you

The tax credit, whatever you were told at the table. Treasury says it twice, once in the PPA guide and once in the main advisory: because you do not own the system, you generally cannot claim federal, state or local tax credits or other incentives, and those go to the system’s owner.

If a salesperson told you a PPA would get you the 30 percent federal credit, that was false when they said it, and it helped sell you a contract that can run for decades. It is doubly wrong now, because the IRS says the Residential Clean Energy Credit is not available for any property placed in service after December 31, 2025. Write down what you were told, when, and by whom. A false promise like that belongs in an attorney general complaint.

This is general information, not legal advice. What your agreement allows turns on its own words and on your state’s law, so put the contract in front of an attorney licensed in your state before you act on any route here.