SC residents were told solar would cut power bills. They never expected 25 year loans

It was a deal that just made sense, thought Carnell Conyers.

In February, a salesman knocked on the door of her home in a quiet neighborhood in Manning, South Carolina, and said a company called Freedom Forever was offering to install solar panels on her house’s roof. The panels would lower her electric bill, and, thanks to a grant, she wouldn’t have to pay a dime, Conyers remembered the 20-year-old salesman saying.

But once the panels were installed, the 68-year-old Conyers, who lives on a fixed income, was shocked to receive two bills in the mail — one was her regular utility bill from Duke Energy, the other was a statement saying she owed her first installment on a $29,541.63 loan to a company she’d never heard of, called Mosaic.

“We never talked about any of this stuff. We never signed for no loan, we never talked about no loan,” Conyers told The State.

But Conyers soon learned that when she’d signed up to have solar panels installed by Freedom Forever, the project was financed through Mosaic, a separate company based in Oakland, California, that finances residential solar projects.

And Conyers wasn’t alone. Her neighbor, Carrie Franklin, 75, said that after solar panels were installed at her home, she learned she owed $54,970.30 to Mosaic for a loan Franklin says she never signed up for. If Franklin makes regular payments, she’ll be 105 years old by the time the loan is paid off.

The two women’s stories are similar to those reported recently around the nation. Federal and state officials, along with attorneys, warn that some consumers are buying into solar energy sales pitches only to be surprised later by the terms.

Earlier this month, the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau issued a consumer advisory about the sales tactics of some solar companies.

“More and more companies now deploy door-to-door salespeople to pressure homeowners to install solar energy — and to borrow money to pay for it,” the federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau wrote in a consumer advisory released Aug. 7. “While saving the environment and reducing energy use are highlighted, upfront and long-term costs for installation and maintenance aren’t always part of the sales pitch.”

“As a result, homeowners can be pressured into complicated solar loans or financing agreements without understanding the costs and risks.”

In South Carolina, the Department of Consumer Affairs has received nearly 20 total complaints against Freedom Forever, which installs the systems, and Mosaic.

“There has been a rise in these kinds of cases in the past few years,” said Susan Ingles, head of the consumer unit at South Carolina Legal Services, a law firm that provides free legal services to low income South Carolinians. “We especially see it with our low income and senior population and particularly in rural areas.”

Freedom Forever and Mosaic also have amassed complaints across the country. In Minnesota, the attorney general sued Mosaic over allegations of hidden fees. In news reports and online reviews, customers of Freedom Forever describe being stuck with loans they didn’t expect for solar panels that don’t work or were never even installed.

“The thing I’ve heard the most is that people don’t understand what they’re buying,” said Sue Berkowitz, director of policy at the Appleseed Legal Justice Center in South Carolina, who said that she had spoken with other homeowners who voiced complaints similar to Conyers and Franklin. The contracts involved are “sophisticated,” Berkorwitz said, and many homeowners don’t have the ability to read and understand them during a high pressure sales situation without a lawyer present.

For their part, the salesman who sold Conyers and Franklin the panels and his employer have denied any wrongdoing. The loan, they say, is a cornerstone of the deal, and paying a fixed monthly loan that costs less than a variable power bill is a better deal for homeowners.

They also maintain that both women signed loan paperwork and received a welcome call from Mosaic, which would have been recorded. The salesman works for a third company, Solar Pros, that sells the systems for Freedom Forever with loans provided through Mosaic.

But both women denied receiving calls and produced paperwork to show that they were initially denied loans, which they say that they did not ask for, only to receive the loans later.

Freedom Forever did not respond to emails requesting comment.

“A loan didn’t come up.”

Carnell Conyers sighed as she stared at the roof of her one story house. It was July 25, and 17 black solar panels gleamed dully under the cloudless sky. The panels should have been turning the sun’s rays into electricity, but they weren’t hooked up to the grid. They had not yet been inspected.

Conyers had been trying to get the panels taken down since she found out about the the money she owed in May, when a $116.10 statement from Mosaic arrived in the mail. According to an incident report she filed with the Manning Police Department, Conyers says she never took out the loan and after she didn’t pay it she had received a letter threatening to place a lien on her home.

The stress was wearing her down, Conyers said that day in July. She had stopped trusting her own decisions, strangers were making her suspicious and her family was growing worried about her rapid weight loss ever since she found out about the loan.

“I don’t want to live in the shadow of these things,” Conyers said.

For months, Freedom Forever had been saying that they couldn’t take the panels down. Fortunately for the Conyers, the situation apparently was resolved. Following multiple complaints from Conyers’ family and after The State reached out to Freedom Forever, a representative of the company told Conyers that the company would remove the panels and were reaching out to Mosaic to cancel the loan.

But if Conyers had made all of her payments, including interest, for the next 25 years, she would have paid Mosaic $48,600.89. While prices for solar panels vary, ConsumerAffairs estimates that a South Carolina homeowner would pay $16,800 for a 6 kilowhatt hour system and up to $28,000 for a 10 kilowhatt hour system, before tax credits are applied.

For Conyers, the ordeal began on Feb. 23, when a pleasant young salesman named Sawyer Garns showed up at her house and told her he represented Freedom Forever, a company that was installing panels for her neighbors. Conyers remembers him saying the company could install solar panels on her roof, at no cost to her, and it would dramatically cut her $267 monthly utility bill. She jumped at the opportunity.

“I’m not going to tell you I’m a big environmentalist,” she said. “I was interested in saving money.”

Conyers and her husband, Dell Conyers, have lived in the same house in Manning for four decades. They’re both retired and live on fixed incomes. He was a factory worker; she worked her way up at the county Disabilities and Special Needs Board over 31 years.

Manning is a small city of just under 4,000 people surrounded by farms. Except for three German Shepherds in the next yard, the Conyers’ neighborhood is quiet. In a city where the median household income is $27,000 a year, it is not a place where many people go looking for the next hot, new thing. But in Conyer’s neighborhood, there are at least four homes with solar panels on the roofs, all installed in the past year.

In conversations with The State and in her police report, Conyers was emphatic that Garns told her the installation would be funded through a “grant.”

“I didn’t think about a loan because a loan didn’t come up,” she said, adding that she never would have agreed to take out a loan. In the police report, Conyers said she never gave “authorization” for a loan.

Speaking to The State, Garns said he regretted the situation and denied describing the program as a grant. “I don’t use that verbiage ever,” he told The State.

Garns said that he was trained to make sure people understand what they were buying, and that he provided information about the loan and the payments.

He said Conyers may have confused tax credits for the grant. Federal and state tax credits can help offset tax bills for homeowners who install solar systems. But the nonrefundable credits only apply to unpaid taxes, typically from untaxed income such as capital gains. That means it has limited benefit for lower income individuals or taxpayers who only receive a W2 form or are on fixed incomes, like the Conyers.

Due to Solar Pros’ commission model, the extensive renovations that the company performed to strengthen the Conyers’ roof before the solar panels meant that Garns did not receive a commission on that sale, said Brandon Wilson, Garns’ manager at Solar Pros.

“I didn’t make a dime,” Garns said, “There was no benefit to mislead her on that.”

Still, selling the systems can be lucrative. On a podcast, Garns, who has been selling solar since 2022, said he made in the ballpark of $220,000 last year selling solar.

Loans in ninety minutes or less

But the process raises questions about whether customers like Conyers have time to fully understand what they are signing up for.

A review of emails sent to Conyers on Feb. 23 shows that the entire process from learning about the solar panels to taking out a nearly $30,000 loan took less than 90 minutes.

Conyers remembers that Garns came by after 5 p.m. on Feb. 23. At 5:52 p.m., she received an email from Mosaic saying that she had been pre-qualified for a loan.

Brandon Wilson, a manager at Solar Pros, told The State that to receive the loan, Conyers would have needed to fill out loan paperwork, provide her Social Security number, be pre-qualified and then complete a welcome call from Mosaic.

In South Carolina, there is also a ten day “cooling off” period that allows the consumer to cancel the purchase or loan with no penalties. All these are meant to act as safeguards for the consumer, Wilson said.

But Conyers maintains that she never received a call from Mosaic, and she said that she doesn’t regularly check her email. The document sent to Conyers by Mosaic, reviewed by The State, said that she only had three business days to cancel the contract.

Copies of the loan documents reviewed by The State contain an electronic signature with the name “Carnell Conyers.” While Conyers said she remembers signing something digitally, she believed that the document was simply to allow Freedom Forever to check if she was eligible for solar with her utility provider, Duke Energy.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Duke Energy said that the company was “not affiliated” with Freedom Forever.

At 6:01 p.m., Conyers received another email from Mosaic addressed to her and her husband saying that their loan application was being rejected because the company was unable to determine their FICO credit score.

But at 6:28 p.m. Carnell received an email saying that an inspection of her roof had been scheduled.

Mosaic did not respond to a request to explain how the loan was denied and then approved.

Nationwide complaints

In their pitch to South Carolina residents, Freedom Forever’s website says solar will allow them to “enjoy cheaper, cleaner, more sustainable energy.”

“Whatever your reason, going solar is worth it!”

But not all customers have been satisfied.

Thirteen complaints were filed against Freedom Forever with the state Department of Consumer Affairs between May 2023 and July 2024.

Nine of those complaints concerned allegations of deceptive, misleading or unethical sales practices along with unfulfilled promises. Seven are still listed as open and pending response from the company.

One open complaint filed in November 2023 reported, “Consumer states she was advised she would no longer have an electric bill and that there was a tax refund associated with the purchase.”

An additional nine complaints have been filed against Mosaic, ranging from billing disputes and claims of misrepresentation of service to claims that Mosaic won’t produce copies of contracts and that inaccurate information was provided to Mosaic without the customer’s knowledge.

Nationally, 312 complaints have been filed against Mosaic with the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau since the beginning of 2020.

Mosaic is also one of three lenders in the solar industry currently being sued by the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office for hidden fees. In April, over a hundred California homeowners protested at the company’s Oakland offices , alleging that Mosaic was issuing loans for work that wasn’t completed.

Both companies have also also drawn scrutiny for practices similar to what has been reported in South Carolina.

In California, CBS reported that one homeowner, who didn’t even have solar panels installed , received notice of a $11,640 loan from Mosaic.

Just like Conyers, Andrea Bokreta told CBS, “I knew I didn’t sign anything.” While Bokreta said that she gave her Social Security to the salesman, she was told that it was needed for her quote.

Freedom Forever provided CBS with an audit of Bokreta’s paperwork, which showed that she viewed the 24 page contract and signed or initialed in seven different spots within 29 seconds. Bokreta insisted she never read nor signed anything, according to CBS.

In Billings, Montana, several other solar companies spoke out about the practices of Solar Pros and Freedom Forever, who they said were giving customers false information. Justice Graham, the owner of YellowBall Roofing and Solar, told local TV-station KTVQ that Solar Pros representatives were incorrectly telling homeowners that they would not have to pay property taxes for 10 years.

“The type of clientele that can really become victimized by this high-pressure, door-to-door are people that just aren’t educated...They don’t even know what hit them. Some fast-talking kid comes in there, promises them the world, and then, bam, their lives are changed. A $50,000 solar system on a 25-year contract, that can affect your life,” Graham told KTVQ.

‘Get out of my yard.’

Carrie Franklin says she’s never even had a mortgage. After working much of her life in Connecticut, Franklin and her husband moved to Manning in 2010 to live in the home they had built on land they bought in the 1970s.

Like her neighbors the Conyers, Franklin is on a fixed income. When Garns came by on Feb 22 and hand wrote on the back of a utility bill how much she could save, she said she was attracted to the idea of increasing her self-sufficiency.

“When I retired I tried to get everything I needed so I didn’t need to need nothing,” said Franklin, whose husband died shortly after they moved to South Carolina.

Just like her neighbors, Franklin denied taking out a loan or even signing paperwork. But Wilson, the Solar Pros supervisor, told The State that the company had proof that Franklin completed the electronic application and that she received a welcome call on Feb. 22. Wilson said that he was unable to share either the recording of the call or the contract because the account had been escalated to the legal team.

In a pile of documents that Franklin showed The State was an old utility bill where Garns had handwritten figures. Next to an amount corresponding her utility payment to Duke Energy was an up arrow. A box surrounded the figue “$13,742” next to the words 25% SC tax credit. At the bottom of the page Garns had written “utility loan” with an arrow to the phrase “Mosaic takes it on.”

When asked, Franklin said she didn’t know what the information on the document meant.

As with Conyers, Mosaic initially denied her application. In a letter the lender sent her, which Franklin showed to The State, the company said it could not provide her with a loan for the panels, citing excessive debt, delinquent credit and insufficient recent credit history.

When she called Garns about the letter, Franklin says she remembers he told her not to worry about it. That May, the panels went up on her house. Shortly after, she received her first statement from Mosaic informing her that she owed her first installment of $240.42 on her $54,970.30 loan.

Mosaic did not respond to The State’s inquiries about Franklin’s loan.

Franklin says that her panels aren’t even hooked up. Speaking to The State, Wilson said that the panels can’t be hooked up until an inspection is completed. But that process has been paused because the situation had been escalated to Freedom Forever’s legal team after Franklin and her son made a complaint, Wilson said.

For her part, Franklin said she’s resigned to paying for the panels. Each month she fills out a postal money order for $240.42 and sends it off to Mosaic, before writing down the amount and date in neat rows in a notebook.

““If anybody comes to my door now, I say ‘get out of my yard,’” Franklin said.