A man knocked. I said no.

A man knocked.

He had a clipboard, and he already knew what I paid for electricity. He had printed the bill out. Next to it he had written a second number, and the second number was smaller.

No money down. Same payment, new company. Twenty-five years.

I said no. Millions of people said yes.

Roughly 190,000 of them said yes to one company. Freedom Forever put about two gigawatts of solar on American roofs, across 35 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. For a few years it was one of the two largest residential installers in the country.

It filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware on April 15. A sale to a group led by its own chief executive fell apart over the summer. On August 7 the case converted to a Chapter 7 liquidation, and a trustee took over the wind-down.

The loans are fine.

Almost every one of those households borrowed from somebody else. GoodLeap, Mosaic, a lease company. That contract runs to the lender, not to the installer. So the payments keep arriving, and the bonds built on those payments keep paying.

A solar system carries two warranties. The liquidation only cancels one of them.

The panels and the inverters carry warranties from the manufacturers, and those survive. Enphase, Tesla, Q CELLS. Different companies, still trading, still on the hook.

The installer's own promises are the ones at risk. Workmanship. Roof penetrations. The production guarantee that says the system makes a set number of kilowatt-hours a year. Those were obligations of Freedom Forever, and Freedom Forever is being sold for parts.

So the court set a date. Customers with unfulfilled deposits or warranty claims have until October 16, 2026 to file one. The meeting of creditors is September 22.

That deadline does not come with a doorbell.

I have no idea how many of those households know it exists. A salesman found every one of them once. Now it is a docket in Delaware and a form on a court website.

It's the same setup every time. The payment stream moves to whoever can defend it. The hardware stays with you.

This connects directly to what happens when an installer stops existing. Start with what a household actually signs.

There are usually three documents and three different companies behind them. A finance agreement. An equipment warranty. An installation warranty.

The equipment warranty belongs to whoever built the hardware. Enphase makes the inverter. Q CELLS or REC makes the panel. Those promises are theirs, and they outlive whoever carried the ladder.

The installation warranty is different. Workmanship. The holes in the roof. A production guarantee promising a set number of kilowatt-hours a year.

That one is only as good as the installer. In a liquidation it becomes an unsecured claim. Unsecured claims get paid last, out of whatever is left, and at a company with more debt than assets, last usually means nothing.

Roughly a hundred American solar companies have failed or closed since 2023. SunPower filed in August 2024. Sunnova and Solar Mosaic both filed in June 2025. PosiGen followed that November.

So there are hundreds of thousands of roofs where the hardware still works and the workmanship promise no longer has an owner. The panels keep making power. There is simply nobody left to call about the flashing.

And here's where it spreads. The failures sit in the installers and the lenders. The payments sit in the households, and households turn out to be steadier than either.

When Solar Mosaic went through Chapter 11, its servicing moved to a new company owned by a bank. More than $8 billion of loans kept being collected on the same terms. The name on the statement changed. Nothing else did.

That is the design working. A loan is a promise from a homeowner, sold into a trust, and the trust does not need the originator to exist.

But the numbers move anyway. When Sunnova's successor servicer took over, it stopped giving borrowers a grace period before recognising delinquencies and charge-offs. Sunnova deals are about a quarter of KBRA's solar index.

December's loss rate jumped to the worst level in the history of that index. KBRA put 100 to 150 basis points of the jump down to the new counting rather than new defaults. January gave most of it back.

In other words, the worst month on record was partly a change in how one company measures a day.

I find that interesting for reasons that have nothing to do with solar. Every credit index has a servicer standing behind it. We almost never ask who.

Meanwhile, the rules changed underneath all of it.

Section 25D paid a homeowner 30% of the cost of a system they owned. It expired on December 31 last year, under the law signed in July 2025. No phase-down, no transition. A system installed in January gets nothing.

Section 48E, the commercial credit, did not expire. A company that owns a rooftop system and sells the household its power can still claim it.

So the subsidy survived. The owner changed.

The industry is struggling to follow. Wood Mackenzie and SEIA now expect US residential installations to contract 23% this year. Installers report longer sales cycles, lower close rates, and not enough tax equity to fund the switch.

California shows it best. Installed capacity there rose 8% in the first half of this year. Permits fell 25%. The first number is last year's contracts finishing. The second one is this year's business.

So the household that goes solar now mostly rents its own roof for twenty years. That asset gets owned, depreciated and securitised by somebody. Just not by the person living under it.

Three more things worth keeping track of.

Japan's finance ministry published its own arithmetic last month. Under the ministry's baseline, the ten-year government bond yield reaches 3.6% in fiscal 2029, and debt service costs about ¥41 trillion a year. It sets aside roughly ¥31 trillion today. A government has forecast a ten-trillion-yen hole in its own budget and printed it.

American truckload contract rates were up 17% year over year in July, excluding fuel, and spot rates sat above contract rates, which almost never happens. Freight volumes did not grow to do that. Drivers and trucks left. FTR counts orders for new heavy trucks through August up 111% on last year, and ACT Research says the remaining 2026 build slots are oversubscribed by 35,000 units. A price rise from the supply side looks identical to a recovery until you check which side moved.

German companies filed 12,812 insolvencies in the first half of this year, the most for any first half since 2013. But creditors' claims in those cases came to €18.5 billion, against €28.2 billion a year earlier. More failures, each one smaller. The damage has moved down into the small end of the Mittelstand, where it does not make the front page. We'll see.

This has happened before.

In 1978 the American government started paying people to put the sun to work on their roofs. The Energy Tax Act gave a homeowner 30% of the first $2,000 spent on a solar system and 20% of the next $8,000. Two years later Congress raised it to 40% of the first $10,000.

An industry appeared to meet it. Most of it was hot water rather than electricity. A tank, a pump, a controller, and a flat collector on the south slope of the roof.

The federal government counted the manufacturers every year. In 1984 there were 206 companies making that kind of collector, and they shipped 11.9 million square feet of it.

The credit expired on December 31, 1985.

In 1986 there were 87 companies left, and they shipped 1.1 million square feet. By 1987 there were 50. By 1988, 45.

Shipments fell by nine tenths in two years. The collectors stayed on the roofs.

There is one more detail in that federal table. The 1985 row is empty. The footnote says no data are available for that year. The one year the industry turned over is the year the survey has no entry.

Those systems needed a pump, a controller and a new anode rod every few years. The firms that sold them were gone. So the panels came down, or stopped working and stayed up.

A residential energy credit expired again on December 31, 2025.

A subsidy builds companies as much as it builds capacity. One of those two things is bolted down.

The hardware stays. The company does not. We'll see.