At six in the morning on April 15, Nathan DeGray received an email: “Due to the macroeconomic challenges facing the residential solar industry, Freedom Forever has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy,” it read. “Unfortunately, effective today, all employee positions are furloughed unless you receive direct communication…indicating otherwise.”
Until that moment, DeGray had worked in Connecticut as a warehouse coordinator for the residential solar installer Freedom Forever. The following day, another email informed him that the payment he was due for hours he had already worked was delayed until further notice: “Currently, there is no ETA.”
And two weeks later, just after midnight on May 1, a third and final email told him that his position had been officially terminated, and that the company’s health insurance had ended just hours before.
DeGray calculated that the one-and-a-half paychecks he was owed, combined with his accrued paid time off and sick time totaled roughly $2,700. “That’s my rent for the next four months,” he said.
DeGray isn’t alone — some 1,600 Freedom Forever employees across the country were laid off that same morning, with no paychecks and no timeline for when they would receive them, if at all.
Until it filed for bankruptcy, Freedom Forever was the second-largest residential solar installer in the United States. Founded in California in 2011, by 2025 it operated in over 30 states and controlled 6.1% of the national market share, second only to competitor Sunrun, which had 12.7% of the annual market share, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie. By the time it closed its doors, Freedom Forever had between $100 million and $500 million in assets, but between $500 million and $1 billion in liabilities; its biggest creditor, solar financing company Mosaic, is owed more than $110 million.
The company’s business was a hybrid of both the dealership model and third-party ownership. The company would sell to residential customers solar systems owned and financed by third parties — for example Sunrun, GoodLeap, or Mosaic — who would pay Freedom Forever for the service. For most of its existence, Freedom Forever relied on external sales teams and subcontractors to find customers and deploy systems; when it filed for bankruptcy, however, it was beginning to move away from that approach.
The company’s failure exposes the inherent flaws of both the dealership and TPO models — and suggests they may be ill-equipped to withstand a difficult year for residential solar, destabilized by the sunsetting of federal tax credits, policy changes, and rising interest rates.
The dealership model
Customer reviews of Freedom Forever vary widely. A Google search yields some that are satisfied — but many others who say they experienced deceptive sales practices, badly designed systems, delays, and poor communication.
Zoë Gaston, principal analyst on the U.S. distributed solar team at Wood Mackenzie, explained that these are often issues for companies like Freedom Forever, where sales teams are incentivized to sell no matter what. “They utilized third-party sales organizations instead of in-house teams,” Gaston said. “This has led to a lot of issues… with high sales commissions, deceptive sales practices, just reduced operational control.”
A May 2024 CBS News investigation, for example, found that some homeowners who had casually talked with Freedom Forever sales representatives found themselves with loans for solar systems they never agreed to take on, and signatures on documents they claim they never signed. In early April, two weeks before the company filed for bankruptcy, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton launched an investigation into “companies who sell solar panel systems and are engaging in fraudulent and deceptive practices,” including Freedom Forever.
(In the intervening weeks, with the hearty support of President Donald Trump, Paxton beat incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in a highly contentious primary; he is now the state’s Republican nominee for U.S. senator.)
Supratim Srinivasan is the CEO of Atma Energy, a residential solar company that uses a vertically integrated model where both sales and installations are dealt with in-house, and operates in many of the same areas as Freedom Forever. He says the dealer model has been a bubble waiting to burst ever since he co-founded Atma in 2020, and that Freedom Forever is just one of its latest victims.
“A lot of these really strong EPC fulfillment partners were contracting with third-party sales organizations to fill their pipeline, and…the sales organizations had the ability to sell contracts from four different vendors at the same time, so they could choose which partner to use and which price to charge,” Srinivasan said. “We saw the makings of a poor consumer experience and of a lack of long-term support.”
Unbundling the solar installation process in this way has led to both a lack of accountability and a lack of control impacting the whole sector. Not only did installers like Freedom Forever contract external sales teams, but they also hired local independent contractors to execute the projects.
“No oversight, no quality control, and then once the system is built, it’s the financing company’s problem,” Srinivasan said. “One bad actor fed the other, and the whole thing just collapsed.”
There are signs now that the industry is starting to regard the dealership model as a whole as unsustainable. In its latest earnings call, for example, Sunrun’s CEO Mary Powell said that “the shifts in the industry have made the dealer model unstable and unattractive,” and that the company had been working on bringing sales representatives in-house. Freedom Forever itself had begun shifting towards a more vertically integrated approach in recent years, but that pivot came too late.
The issue with third-party ownership
The other issue with Freedom Forever was in how it made money. Because it didn’t own any of the systems it installed, the company had no asset base to fall back on in times of hardship. Operations were heavily dependent on the financing provided by third-party owners, and Freedom Forever only earned money once it hit installation milestones. This created a dynamic of lots of debt, and aggressive growth as a means of handling it.
Mikel Wentworth, a former quality and training specialist at Freedom Forever in Florida, recounted that towards the end, this manifested in the company aggressively taking on new projects without managing to complete them.
“We were emphasizing starting new projects before we were fully closing out existing projects,” Wentworth said. “And that would delay our ability to get financing on the past jobs until they were closed out — and sometimes until the utility company would allow them permission to operate.”
No oversight, no quality control, and then once the system is built, it’s the financing company’s problem. One bad actor fed the other, and the whole thing just collapsed.
As Srinivasan notes, it’s a symptom of the broader issue with the third-party ownership model. Companies like Freedom Forever “are so overleveraged and take on so much debt that the only way to sustain is through growth,” he said. “If not, the debt comes calling, and they fold.”
That’s all well and good in a favorable market. But the sunset of the 25D residential solar tax credit at the end of 2025, which gave homeowners a 30% federal tax credit on the cost of purchasing a solar system, removed a key demand driver. Wood Mackenzie is now projecting a roughly 20% contraction in residential solar installation volume for 2026, according to Gaston, and that’s before taking into account Freedom Forever’s bankruptcy.
Freedom Forever’s difficulties began in earnest when one of its financing partners, Mosaic — which was also one of the company’s largest creditors — filed for bankruptcy in June 2025, removing one of its financing lifelines.
A few months later, the company started showing signs of distress. In February 2026, it laid off about 20% of its workforce and exited 10 state markets. “We were just shutting down branches left and right,” DeGray recounted. “We knew [the end] was coming, but everybody thought it was going to take us a bit.” For the company’s last six months, he added, the warehouse where he worked sat mostly empty: “I had the hardest time trying to get any sort of equipment.”
The company primarily relied on U.S.-manufactured panels from Qcells in order to chase domestic content manufacturing bonuses. “Those products with domestic content attributes tied to them are a hot commodity,” Wentworth said. “And because of that, their prices are a lot higher.”
Bad reputation
When Freedom Forever filed for bankruptcy, it not only left most of its former employees without pay, but it also left many customers stranded. Those with systems already installed and operational were in the hands of third-party financing companies, and largely unaffected. But customers in the middle of installations were suddenly without anyone to finish the job — and in many cases, without even anyone to tell them what was happening.
Atma Energy and other companies like it have been stepping in, Srinivasan said, sometimes with the help of manufacturers like Enphase, which have been flagging the stranded projects to local installers. Stepping in entails taking over the permit and closing out the system, or in other cases submitting a new permit; the process can cost up to $1,200 in Texas, where Atma operates.
“In our experience so far, all the contractors that have gone out of business typically offer no explanation to the customers that are in the pipeline,” he said. “Oftentimes, [the customers] don’t even know the company’s gone out of business — they’re just waiting and waiting and waiting, until the utility cancels the permit, and that’s when the complaints start.”
It’s a sudden lack of communication that risks damaging the industry as a whole, especially given that Freedom Forever is far from the first of its kind to go out of business — SunPower and Titan both filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 2024, for example — and probably not the last.
“It is so harmful to the industry: the perception of solar to the average homeowner is that it’s a scam and it doesn’t work,” Srinivasan said.
Ultimately, Freedom Forever filed for Chapter 11, which is technically a reorganization, not a liquidation. As Gaston noted, that leaves open the possibility that the company could continue operating in some capacity, as SunPower has done before it. “I won’t speculate on what that will look like,” she said. “But I just think that’s important to be aware of.”
For now, the bankruptcy court filing states that there will be no funds available for unsecured creditors once administrative expenses are paid. That includes the roughly 1,600 former employees estimated to still be owed money, some of whom have been involved in a class action lawsuit against the company.
