A remedy for unscrupulous solar ‘salesmen’

Within the ever-growing U.S. solar energy industry, consumers are being approached by predatory salespeople with inadequate knowledge of the market, seemingly intent on using misleading strategies to capitalize on selling people solar for their homes.

A new startup in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley hopes to remedy that by giving legitimate solar marketers and contractors a badge of distinction.

Recheck, which brands itself as a “verification platform for the residential solar industry,” is a Hanover-based company working to develop a nationwide registry in cooperation with the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit trade association that has represented the American solar energy industry since 1974.

The registry launched on June 20, and is first working with solar salespeople and contractors who are seeking attractive, discounted rates on solar costs to pitch to consumers and thus need a financing partner to reach those discounts.

The registry will use the firm’s in-house Recheck ID system, which co-founder and CEO Tim Trefren said he hopes could bridge the requirements for selling consumer solar products as they differ by state.

“California is the most robust, or at least the biggest, as they have something called the Home Improvement Salesperson license,” Trefren said in an interview last month just after the registry’s launch. “Other individual locations have something similar: like Maryland has one and New York City used to but they stopped.”

Receiving a Recheck account is a two-step process involving an ID verification of taking a photo of a government ID and then taking a selfie to confirm a salesperson or contractor’s name and face match what’s shown on their federal identification. They are then asked to take a third-party assessment that measures their understanding of solar industry best practices and allows them to distinguish themselves based on validated training that adheres to novel SEIA consumer protection standards.

Recheck is working with “nearly every U.S. residential solar financing company” and solar product suppliers, including Dividend Finance, Freedom Forever, Mosaic, Palmetto and Sunrun, according to a press release.

Networking with most of these companies was made possible by the company’s tiny but skilldiverse team, Trefren said, who works on product strategy, customer engagement, data and software. He’s joined by fellow co-founders Garret Heaton, a software engineer, and Chris Collins, a data analyst, solar financier and investor.

Heaton, a native of Plainfield, co-founded tech startups HipChat and Podhero. He moved back from the West Coast to the Upper Valley as his family grew to be closer to his other relatives, according to Trefren, who said he followed in turn.

“Garret and I met in California 15 years ago when we were both starting our previous companies,” said Trefren, who founded Mixpanel, a San Francisco-based product and market investment analytics service that remains active.

Collins, who founded U.S. solar and storage analytics firm Ohm Analytics, lives near Heaton and Trefren in Norwich, Vermont. Trefren said Collins was a longtime solar lender in Californi “The original idea sprung from (Collins’) work at a solar lender 10 years ago, where he observed some of these (credibility) problems,” Trefren said. “What brought it to fruition was the fact that he has relationships with all these lenders, and I have the technical chops and experience building tech companies to implement the vision of this platform where we can work with all of these different partners to bring data together and add transparency to the process.

In addition to the financing and supplier partnerships, Recheck will be a member of an ongoing SEIA advisory board supporting the new standards.

“This is a critical partnership as SEIA works to make sure every solar installation in the United States is safe, reliable and meets customer expectations,” Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of SEIA, said in the Recheck release. “Solar remains America’s most popular form of energy, (and) … it’s our job to make sure the solar and storage industry is accountable to the millions of families that are putting their trust in us to power their lives.”

In this early era for Recheck, Trefren says the company and its platform is more of an indirect support for consumers, as Recheck ID is currently helping financiers manage who can offer their financing, which is beneficial to everyday customers. Ahead of the business’s first-ever onboarding call for Recheck ID applicants, Trefren said about 50 contractors from around the country had connected with Recheck to go through the proces As its registry grows, Recheck intends to offer industry-wide data exchanges across its network for solar companies to perform a background check on prospective sales partners to see whether they have any recorded consumer protection violations.

The practice of unscrupulous solar sales has resulted in a surge of consumer complaints about solar panel installations in recent years, according to a Time Magazine report last November, using data from the SEIA and Federal Trade Commission.

The report, following changes over six years starting in 2018, tracked 33 complaints from door-to-door solar sales in 2021. In 2023, that figure had soared to 154 complaints, a 1,183% or five-fold increase from 2018. Meanwhile, the amount of residential-installed solar capacity available only slightly went up 40% in 2023 relative to 2018.

That increase, Time correspondent Alana Semuels wagers, is partly owed to a “bro” culture on social media where young adult men are encouraged to pursue solar sales using falsehoods. Those include misrepresentation of what extent tax credits take off solar panel costs — like saying consumers can receive free solar panels from federal agencies — or claims that panels will be connected to power grids within weeks of a sale The latter assertion is at odds with the reality for some Granite Staters, the New Hampshire Bulletin recently reported, with residents waiting for upwards of two years or more for utility companies like Eversource to conduct interconnection studies on their land to determine the effects of larger solar projects on the grid.

In that report, nonprofit Clean Energy NH’s Sam Evans-Brown called the procedures a “Wild West” situation.

Though Recheck doesn’t directly concern instances like utility companies’ cooperation with solar suppliers, Evans-Brown said in an interview about Recheck he’s excited to see a system that brings the solar industry to “a point in the maturity of the industry where it’s time to do some self-policing” of underhanded marketing and sales tactics.

“I’ve become pretty adept at evaluating the bids that people get, and what I’ve seen is that there are companies that will send over really, really expensive solar projects, but will dress them up in such a way with financing and shiny graphs that suggests that they’re not expensive,” he highlighted as a problematic practice he hopes Recheck can tackle.

Recheck intends to offer industry-wide data exchanges for solar companies to perform a background check on prospective sales partners.