Solar Project Takeover Checklist

In a fixed order, and the order is the method. Establish what the project is on paper first — permit status and applicant of record, interconnection state, contract, funding position — then whether the design documents may lawfully be used, then what is physically installed, then the money and the lien position, then the permit and interconnection routes, then the homeowner and the warranty boundary. Assessing the roof before the file is the single most common way a takeover gets priced wrong, because a lapsed permit or an untransferable plan set changes the exercise from a transfer into a new project on a partially built house.

They sit on opposite sides of a failure. A vetting scorecard is prospective: it scores whether a partner is likely to hold up, across licence, insurance, capacity, warranty and financial durability, before the first job is assigned. This checklist is retrospective and is about one specific project whose contractor has already stopped. Vetting asks whether to engage; this asks what is recoverable. A company can have passed the first perfectly and still produce the second, because durability assessments are probabilistic and projects are individual.

Because it decides whether there is a counterparty. A voluntary change leaves a company that can consent to a permit transfer, sign a lien waiver and hand over as-built records — every document that arrives voluntarily is one nobody has to reconstruct. A lapsed licence leaves a company that still exists and can often still cooperate, but adds the separate question of work performed while the licence was not in force. A wind-down leaves nothing: no consent, no waivers, and records limited to what the homeowner holds and what is in the public file. The same project is a materially different exercise in each case.

Two, most often. An unresolved lien position, because unpaid subcontractors and suppliers from the earlier phase may have recourse against the property and that exposure follows the payment chain rather than the change of contractor. And a funder that will not re-approve, because most funding arrangements condition draws on work performed by an approved party, so a contractor change alters something the approval rested on. Both are discoverable in the first week for the cost of some records requests, which is the argument for doing the record stage before anything else.

Not by default, and the assumption that it does is the thing to correct in writing at the start. A workmanship obligation is a promise from a specific legal entity, and where that entity no longer exists there may be nobody obliged to honour it. What a reasonable incoming contractor does instead is inspect what was installed, state in writing what it is accepting, adopting or replacing, and warrant its own scope. Equipment warranties from the manufacturers generally survive independently, though a registration naming a company that no longer exists is worth re-filing while the serial numbers are to hand.

Generally not. A permit is issued to a licensed contractor and carries that entity's accountability to the jurisdiction. Where the authority having jurisdiction allows a permit to be transferred, that is by a wide margin the cheaper route and it usually requires the incoming contractor's licence and insurance, and often the outgoing contractor's consent or documented evidence that consent cannot be obtained. Where transfer is not available, the permit is closed or lapses and a new application is filed, which means rejoining the review queue rather than amending an open file. Both are jurisdictional decisions, so this is a call to that department rather than a general rule.

It is the hardest category in the assessment and it should be scoped separately rather than averaged into the rest. An incoming contractor cannot warrant what it has not seen, and a jurisdiction has one remedy always available to it — requiring the work to be uncovered. Other routes exist in some jurisdictions and are discretionary rather than reliable, so a takeover plan that depends on one of them is a plan with a hole in it. Identify the concealed scope, agree the verification route with the department before committing, and price the uncovering as a live possibility.