What if you want to sell the house

I’ve not read the contract yet. Considering they include removal an reinstallation labor for free if someone renovates their roof, they theoretically might as well relocate them to another house when moving within their service area (which is constrained as well by the region of the green certificates).

What happens when you want to exit the contract within the 30 years?

Certainly you can buy the gear. And if you buy all the panels you are out of the contract. Price per panel as they age is something like this:

• years 0-5: €850
• years 5-10: €750
• years 10-15: €650
• …
• year 30: €0

If you want to exit the contract and return the panels, I have no idea. But since these prices seem to be heavily inflated to cover their labor, I imagine it’s quite uninteresting to return the panels because they likely factor in the labor.

When the sun is shining at peak brightness, what’s the guarantee that you get to use all of it?

All the boxes have LCDs. The 1st box shows the power generation. Then another box shows what of that you are consuming. I don’t recall what the 3rd box shows but I can only imagine it’s the energy fed to the grid. I assume the original electric meter is still installed, in which case it might be possible to check the math.

There could still be shenanigans because it’s probably hard to verify. I think as a low consumer I might be better off buying the panels and getting an i/o meter (not sure what the correct term is but something that compensates me for what is fed back to the grid).

Anyway, I appreciate the reply. I’ll have to mirror some of those questions to the supplier.

I can only guess. I don’t think that could even be in contract. My guess:

• another company buys it: the buyer takes over the contracts
• liquidation: normally assets go to the creditors. But every homeowner is a creditor for the property in the future. So I think a reasonable court would just turn ownership over to the homeowner. OTOH, the energy company is also a party to the deal because the energy supplier gets the unused power. Perhaps the panels would be taken over by the energy supplier until the 30 year mark.

The cost of installation, wiring and transformers is more than the cost of panels.

They likely factor all those costs into the panel costs. But would labor and parts overhead represent 9/10ths of €8500, for example? Looks like they install 3 boxes in the basement plus panels for around €7500.

That may be where the fat is. So I’m tempted to say this is only a good deal for someone who really wants hands-off on-grid solar power for 30 yrs. And perhaps a bad deal if someone foresees going off grid and doing their own labor.

After the 30 years of “borrowing” the panels, who pays for their removal and recycling?

I assume that’s the homeowner because the supplier simply makes it all the homeowner’s property after 30 years… likely so they don’t have to deal with it.