For the 13 years that John Berger ran Sunnova, he saw his company’s main business of leasing and installing solar panels as a means to a longer-term relationship with his customers: servicing those rooftop units.
In June, however, the debt from the leasing business grew too much for the publicly traded firm to withstand and — after the Trump administration canceled a $3 billion loan — Sunnova filed for Chapter 11 protections. Today, Reddit is full of purported former customers complaining that the bankrupt company “is not offering the service of removing and reinstalling their own panels.”
Now Berger is back at the helm of a new company that’s laser-focused on doing just that.
In September, he licensed the name Otovo from an eponymous Norwegian startup that has built a business across 13 European countries providing round-the-clock maintenance service to customers with solar panels, batteries, and generators in need of repair. Like many U.S. drivers do with AAA, these customers pay a subscription fee for speedy fixes.
Tomorrow, Latitude Media has learned, the Texas-based U.S. company is set to merge with its sister firm in Oslo. Berger will serve as CEO of the trans-Atlantic company, which is publicly traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange and plans to eventually dually list on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ.
“At Sunnova, I was always focused on service,” Berger told Latitude Media in the lead-up to the merger’s announcement. “If you go back and look at earnings calls, I looked at the new build market and financing as ways of getting service customers.”
In the solar industry, “everyone else viewed it the opposite,” he said. “They wanted new builds and financing but had to deal with service. As a result, you had a service problem — and hence a reputation problem in the industry.” At Otovo, Berger added, they’re “going to keep financing out of it.”
The down-turn opportunity
But Berger does see an opportunity in the bankruptcies yet to come.
In the U.S., the looming phaseout of federal tax credits to support construction of new solar units and strict new import rules on panels manufactured overseas bode ill for installation companies, suggesting the residential solar industry will need to evolve its business model.
“With all these installers that are going out of business, if you thought you had a service problem before, now you really have a problem,” Berger said. “Now when you call you’re going to get a dial tone.”
Otovo charges membership fees with different windows of service: service within 48 hours for $9, within 24 hours for $29, or within 12 hours for $49. (The totals are about the same in euros.) The startup already has 45,000 customers, with roughly 7,000 each in Poland and Norway and plenty more in European countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany.
Whereas Sunnova spent tens of millions of dollars every year on software to manage the business, Otovo said artificial intelligence has allowed its small team to code its own back-end system that cost the company roughly $500,000.
The startup’s expansion plans run through acquiring smaller mom-and-pop repair teams around the world who already service their local rooftop energy systems. Much like FedEx or Amazon’s delivery team, some of those maintenance workers will be Otovo employees and others will be contractors. At some point, Berger said, he could envision humanoid robots assisting with the repair work.
A big and growing market
But the real appeal of Otovo’s business is the size of the market. Between the U.S. and Europe, there are upward of 33 million residential solar customers alone. By 2028, Berger has set a goal of locking in 250,000 service subscribers.
He doesn’t have a ton of competition for their business. While a handful of companies are already in solar maintenance — including the Seattle-based Omnidian that bought Sunnova’s service business for $7 million in July — it remains a niche sector.
That’s particularly true in the U.S., which is a smaller market because rooftop solar faces steeper hurdles both from local permitting restrictions and from policy disincentives in markets where utilities still boast vertically integrated monopolies. Installing solar is simply more expensive per household in the U.S. than in the majority of Europe.
“We like Europe because Europe is deregulated, or liberalized as they’d say here,” Berger said from his hotel room in Oslo following a series of meetings with Otovo’s offices in Poland, Italy, and Spain. “We still have vertically integrated monopolies in this country, and we make more money on a per customer basis in a deregulated market. Europe is a more attractive market because it’s bigger for solar than the U.S. in its entirety.”
Still he said, “both sides of the pond have had real trouble in the industry.”
In Europe, solar companies are going bankrupt after the war in Ukraine drove up electricity prices that sent demand surging, only to fall again as interest rates climbed, household purchasing power fell, and the power price spike eased. Meanwhile, in the U.S. the market has struggled with what Berger characterized as “the policy whipsaw.” The U.S. industry outlook could change yet again if Democrats take back Congress in next year’s midterm election, or when Trump leaves office in 2028.
“That doesn’t really matter to us though,” Berger said. To meet his target of a quarter-million customers in the next three years, “business can be extremely slow,” as he only needs a tiny sliver of the tens of millions of households whose panels and batteries could need service.
“What’s the risk? Things stop breaking?” Berger added with a laugh. “Pretty sure that’s not going to happen.”
