Solar Lease Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

No, free solar panels are not a scam. Entering a solar lease or solar PPA will still end up saving you money on your utility bills. But the reality is that you do not technically own the system, and the solar energy the panels produce is not free. Under solar lease agreements, ownership is retained by the solar company, and you pay for the electricity it produces. Go to my Profile and you can find all about Solar Panel material there...

I once rented a house that was built behind another street-front house. We had to access it by using the front neighbour’s driveway (and he made it abundantly clear on move-in day that it was HIS driveway).The neighbour told us he had built the second house after he and his wife separated, so she could live there. He didn’t want to sell his house as part of the property settlement, so he subdivided the land instead and gave her the house at the rear. Since then, the wife had remarried and moved overseas and decided to lease the property via a real estate agency.While there, we often noticed lights on in our front garden that we hadn’t turned on. We searched and searched and could not find a switch that operated them. They were definitely not solar-powered lights.After about six months, the absentee owner switched to a new real estate office and someone from the new one came over to look around the house and do a new rental appraisal. She asked me for the key to the cellar.What cellar?There was a cellar under the house that was never listed in our lease agreement. We found out later that the front neighbour had the key and had been going in there at night (doing goodness knows what). He was the one who’d been turning on the garden lights from the switch inside the cellar.One of the reasons we never realised it was there is that cellars and basements are very uncommon in most parts of Australia; it just never occurred to us that we might have one. Apparently it went under the full length of the house and goodness knows if the neighbour could see into the house from down there.The whole thing creeped me out.Thankfully, the new realtor decided she could get triple the weekly rent I’d been paying. I had no problem refusing a new lease and moving on quickly.

Yes. There are some good reasons to think twice about leasing solar if you're planning to sell your home in 5 years.1. Solar leases have a reputation for unfair small print… “gotcha-text.” Now, in late 2011, I don’t know if the sleaze is gone, but everyone needs to look carefully at the prepayment calculation in any lease. The websites of the leasing companies casually refer to the opportunity to “buy-out the lease” but don’t spell-out how the buy-out amount is calculated. If you have 15 more years of $200/month payments, you DON’T want to be required to pay 15 years x 12 months/year x $200/month = $36,000. So study the contract, and understand how the future stream of payments is discounted if the contract is paid-off paid early.2. Residential solar leases exist because of an accelerated tax depreciation benefit available to businesses leasing solar, but not available directly to homeowners. That benefit requires that the leasing company hold the lease for six years. I wouldn't be surprised to see significant hurdles if you wished to escape before 6 years.3. Solar leasing companies advertise that the contract can be picked-up by the new owner, but some companies seem to downplay the qualification process for the new owner. Note that he/she will typically be required to have a 680 - 700 FICO. There might be additional requirements, like an appropriate income to dept ratio. When you’ve got someone interested in your home, these additional hurdles might break the deal.4. When you sign a solar lease, you will have the chance to front-load or back-load the benefits. If you agree to a steep inflation escalator for the lease amount, your lease payment in the first few years will be quite attractive. Conversely, if you lock-in no escalator, the benefit of the lease will be minimal in the beginning, but 15 years from now, that $200/month will be very attractive to a prospective home-buyer. For your “five-years into the contract” scenario, I don’t think that the no-escalator agreement will wow prospects, but I expect that a high escalator will scare away some prospects.I’m drafting a website on solar leases and I would be grateful if readers of this post contacted me with examples of particularly fair – or unfair - text in residential solar leases. Thank you.