Distributed Energy and the Customer

On 5 August 2024 SunPower filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware. It had stopped signing new leases and power-purchase agreements, selling systems and installing them in July (reported). Its 2023 revenue had been about $1.69 billion, with a net loss of about $247 million (company). A few weeks later its brand, its Blue Raven Solar installer, its new-homes business and its network of dealers were sold to Complete Solaria for about $45 million in cash plus certain liabilities (reported). In April 2025 Complete Solaria renamed itself SunPower. Its chairman was T.J. Rodgers, the semiconductor executive whose company, Cypress, had rescued the original SunPower twenty-two years earlier.

The company that failed had once made the most efficient mass-produced solar cells in the world. Richard Swanson, a Stanford professor, had founded it in 1985 to commercialise back-contact silicon cells. Cypress took it over in 2002 and listed it on Nasdaq in November 2005; Total bought about 60% of it in June 2011 for about $1.38 billion (reported). In August 2020 SunPower spun off its manufacturing as Maxeon and kept a US business that sold rooftop systems to households, mostly through independent dealers, and financed them with its own loans and leases. It no longer made the product it was famous for. It sold a route to customers and the money to pay for it.

Both broke at once. California's Public Utilities Commission decided on 15 December 2022 to replace full retail net metering for new rooftop customers with a net billing tariff, effective 15 April 2023, under which exported power was credited at the utility's avoided cost, about 75% less on average (CPUC estimate, reported). Installers rushed to file applications before the deadline, and then California's residential market fell sharply. At the same time interest rates on solar loans rose from promotional rates of about 3% in 2021 to about 7–9% (reported range). SunPower delayed its third-quarter 2023 report because of an inventory accounting error at a subsidiary, restated the first two quarters of the year in December, breached the covenants on its loans, borrowed up to $175 million on second-lien terms from its largest shareholder, a holding company owned by TotalEnergies and Global Infrastructure Partners, in February 2024, and lost its chief executive the same month (company, SEC filings). Within a year Sunnova and the solar lender Mosaic had also filed, in June 2025.