Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I bought a house with solar panels 6 years ago.

There was an ethernet cable plugged into the inverter panel, which ran to a Comcast box.

We switched to FIOS after a couple of months, and never switched the connectivity of the solar panels. Everything worked fine, but ...

A few months later, I received a strongly worded email from an organization I had never heard of, saying that I needed to get the solar panels back online, because it was a requirement of the contract the previous owner had entered into to sell the SRECs generated by the panels. Failing to connect the panels to the Internet could lead them to pursue action related to a lien they had on our property.

Wait, what contract? And what lien? This was the first I'd heard of either, and the lien hadn't come up during the title-insurance process.

It turns out the previous owner of the house had entered into a contract with an organization in our state that pays you a lump sum, if you sign away the rights to the SRECs your system generates. The owner had used that lump sum to help pay for the panels.

But then he sold the house to my wife and me, without ever disclosing the existence of the contract. So basically he sold the SRECs to both of us. He sold them to the organization by virtue of their contract, and he sold them to us, by virtue of the ownership of the panels transferring to us when we bought the house.

And the lien never came up because it was not against the real estate itself; rather, it was against the SRECs -- the Solar Renewable Energy Credits that are generated by the panels. They're not physical assets, but they do have substantial value.

It took the retention of a lawyer and a whole bunch of back-and-forth between us, the seller, our buyer and seller's agents, the lawyer who handled our settlement, and the SREC-buying organization to get the whole mess sorted out.

In the end, we got the lien and contract dissolved ... and then we hooked the panels up to FIOS, and I get handy little charts of all the SRECs we're generating :)

So, the solar panels conveyed with the house (as physical property), but the contracts covering them were never (re-)agreed to by you? And the lien wasn't against the physical solar panels?

I'd be curious how the state organization thought they had cause to pursue you?

How is that not the seller not lying about property (they didn't own the panels free and clear) and thus liable for effectively selling stolen property? In which case, state organization would be free to sue the seller, and you have no part in the proceedings.

What laws did it end up turning on?

My guess is title companies haven't caught up to this - they've never had unreal/intangible property associated with real estate before.

Mineral rights? But that's probably specialized to certain parts of the US (upper midwest, southwest, NE Appalachia).

And water rights, but mostly a west-of-the-Mississippi thing?

Yeah, those would be things they might know about, but mineral rights usually DON'T convey (in some places they do) and water rights is usually a farmland thing.

I daresay this title company will now be on the lookout for things like this!

Water rights are very common for residential properties here in Utah. I currently live in a townhome, but several of the homes I had looked at had X "shares" of water from the reservoir in the mountains a few miles away.

You would think hopefully that having title insurance. That the title company would need to do everything for hopefully no out of pocket cost.

Title insurers have not had to do due diligence for decades because record keeping has gotten so reliable there is almost never a problem. The underwriters just eat whatever occasional costs arise, and title agents make bank - at least on the East Coast of the US, out West they are typically one entity but the process is the same. Solar adds an interesting new wrinkle!

Title companies are like an old folks home for politically connected lawyers. They do very little, and make enough money to spackle cash over their mistakes.

You're correct that the seller never informed us of the contract, even though he was required to. Our state has a standard form that buyers fill out, indicating whether there are any encumbrances, liens, etc. that the seller needs to be aware of.

What the seller SHOULD have done is informed us that the contract would have to be transferred to us as part of the home sale, and we would have factored that into our offer.

But because they failed to inform us, they ended up selling the same property to two different parties.

And you're also correct that we were never a party to the contract, and that's basically what our lawyer spelled out in our demand letter. He basically said that this was a breach of contract between the previous owner and the organization (the two parties to the contract), and they needed to handle it themselves and leave us out of it.

Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth, the organization agreed to not pursue this any further with us and nullify the lien. They had the option to pursue the previous owner for breach of contract, which would likely have involved him returning the money, but I don't know if they actually did so or chalked it up as a loss.

Did it end up costing you money to get that resolved? It drives me crazy that with housing contracts, they protect essentially everyone except the buyer. It's never anyone else's problem because of the contract somehow covering them (lawyers, agents, sellers, etc.), but somehow, the language never quite covers buyers.

We purchased a house, and within just days, the basement flooded because cleaning wipes were flushed down the toilet by the prior owner, clogging the system. So the sellers knew about the flooding or they flushed the stuff while moving out. It wasn't covered under any clause by interpretation, although it should have been by literal reading of the contract. Seller's can basically do whatever they want besides burn the house down.

We have a solar loan that we procured for our system. We're entitled to 100% of the generation, it's just a simple loan for the $40k system cost itself. But when we went to refinance, it was a pain in the ass explaining to the lender (Chase) that the loan has a lien against the SOLAR SYSTEM itself, and NOT the property. It shows up as a "second mortgage" in many systems, but it is EXPRESSLY NOT secured by the underlying physical HOUSE, just the solar panels and inverters themselves. We finally were able to get the lender to waive their positioning on the lien to clear the way for the refi, which was nice, but it was a _process_.

How can one sell their SRECs though? News to me. Have panels but never got credits for the SRECs. I do have net metering enabled.

Several states have programs that buy them at a price high enough to defray installation costs, to encourage adoption of solar. Part of the installer’s job is to do that paperwork for you, so you’d know if you had that option. You can also sell them to other states if you set up with a marketplace, typically SRECTrade. However, the fees and low sale price are prohibitive if you’re not in a state that statutorily buys them for a higher amount

This depends per country. But be aware that if you sell them, the buyer buys the right to generate electricity using fossil fuel, and sell them as if they are green/renewable. If your intent is to accelerate the transition to renewables, you should not sell them.

Are you still able to sell your SRECs with the system disconnected, or are you foregoing that as a cost of being offline?

I'd probably lose out on $500 per year from my system if I didn't sell them. At this point, though, it might _actually_ be asking the question of how much I value my privacy.

If you sell your SRECs you're basically undoing any potential climate good your solar panel might be doing.

Interesting - can you elaborate on this?

The idea is that you're selling your SRECs to someone (say a coal-powered bitcoin miner) so they can offset the pollution they're doing and not have to build their own controls. The argument is that if you did NOT sell, they would have to solve the problem some other way.

Just like if Tesla didn't sell electric vehicle credits to other manufacturers, those companies would have to find other solutions to comply.

SREC mandates are used to achieve a percentage of renewable generation, not an emissions quantity.

It works out the same, someone doesn't have to build solar that would otherwise have to if the homeowners give them their credits.

Yes, the end result is that energy generated in the state is sufficiently renewable per the government mandate, with homes contributing to it where it makes more financial sense than building greenfield solar or wind. In states where total demand is falling, conventional fuel plants are also likely able to be closed.

I think the OP's point is that it would be MORE renewable if the homeowners sat on their credits.

Yes, I can see that, but that would have to be balanced against the lower number of installations due to the higher costs to the homeowners. For many people, the payback period would be too long without the credits. As solar becomes less expensive, these programs will cease to exist, and already don't exist in many sunny states.

Only if your base assumption is that everyone has to build solar, or would otherwise do it out of the goodness of their heart.

If your base assumption is that nobody is going to lift a finger for the common good, than the purpose of SRECs is so that a polluting Bitcoin miner pays you to put solar panels on your home, so that you get some good out of it and we don't all have an incentive to be polluting Bitcoin miners.

People who believe that everyone will naturally do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts are often nicer to be around, but tend to get screwed by their inaccurate view of reality.

While you're definitely not wrong, there are probably better vehicles for home energy users to meaningfully affect emissions. I make ~7 SRECs (7MWh) per year, and assuming I'm average, it'd take close to 100 homes not selling their SRECs for one year to offset an average coal plant for just one hour (http://www.energyjustice.net/coal/igcc/factsheet-long.pdf says the average coal plant puts out 667MW).

My state doesn't have time-of-use based pricing, but I do see this as one particularly effective way of shifting load (not installed capacity!) towards more emissions-friendly sources. The sun shines on home solar panels while we're not home; then absent any other incentives, we come home in the dark and do all sorts of energy-intense activities, like heating rooms and cooking dinner.

That's not true because the purchase still raises the cost of buying credits.

Of course, the SRECs and other subsidies are the only reason that there is actually a solar industry anyway. The economics of solar simply don't work and would not attract any investment at all if it were not for huge crony-ready subsidies paid by governments.

(FWIW, I'm not anti-solar at all, but I am a realist, and spent six years in the utility/commercial solar industry.

I'm all for subsidies, but I don't like SREC. The truth is our economies and populations are still growing, and so is our demand for energy. If we let solar supplement out energy instead of replace it, it's close to useless. Solar needs to be a pressure to reduce our carbon footprint, only then would it be tax dollars well spent.

You can’t, because your production is verified by the data you upload to the SREC marketplace. You might even lose escrow you paid at installation.

Something similar happened to me with solar city power purchase plan or something before they got bought out by Tesla

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