Unlock 40% Tax Credits with New Solar Financing

The 30% federal residential solar tax credit is gone. It expired at the start of 2025, and millions of homeowners who assumed they'd eventually get around to going solar are now staring at a significantly less attractive incentive picture. Or so they thought.

A new financing product called Propel — launched by SolSource Solutions and TriBeam Financial — is threading a needle that most homeowners and even many installers didn't know existed. By combining a prepaid power purchase agreement structure with domestic content hardware, Propel can unlock up to 40% in federal tax credits on residential solar and storage installations. That's actually more generous than what was available before the residential ITC expired.

Here's how it works, why it matters, and what it signals about where solar financing is heading.

The Mechanism Behind the 40% Number

The math isn't magic — it's structure.

Traditional residential solar loans and leases let homeowners claim the 30% Investment Tax Credit directly. That credit is now gone for residential owners. But third-party owned (TPO) structures — leases and power purchase agreements where a company, not the homeowner, technically owns the system — operate under commercial ITC rules, which remain intact.

Propel uses a prepaid PPA or lease model. The homeowner pays the full contract value upfront, typically through a loan originated via TriBeam's Concert Finance platform. Because the system is owned by a third party, the tax credits flow to the system owner — not the homeowner — and those credits can be monetized through tax equity structures that ultimately reduce the cost passed on to the customer.

The additional 10% comes from domestic content compliance under the Inflation Reduction Act. Propel's exclusive hardware partnership with Enphase Energy is specifically engineered to clear that hurdle. Enphase microinverters and battery systems meet IRA domestic content requirements, pushing the effective ITC from 30% to 40%. That's a meaningful difference — on a $25,000 system, we're talking about the gap between $7,500 and $10,000 in tax benefit that can be priced back into the customer's economics.

For context, most traditional solar loans today are operating without any residential ITC at all. Propel isn't just competing with conventional financing — it's working from a fundamentally different tax position.

What "Prepaid" Actually Changes

Prepaid solar financing sounds counterintuitive at first. You're paying the full contract value at closing instead of spreading payments across 20 or 25 years. But the structure solves several problems that have plagued traditional solar leases for years.

The most obvious: no annual price escalators. Standard solar leases often include 2–3% annual payment increases baked into the contract. Over a 20-year term, that compounds into a significantly higher total cost than what customers are quoted at the point of sale. Propel eliminates escalators entirely. The monthly loan payment is fixed, which makes the financial commitment legible in a way that traditional leases rarely are.

There's also a purchase option built in — homeowners can buy the system outright starting in year six. That single feature reframes the entire product. Rather than being locked into a perpetual lease with a company that owns equipment on your roof, Propel customers have a defined path to ownership. For homeowners who are skeptical of TPO structures — and there are many, given the industry's history with aggressive lease tactics — that exit ramp matters enormously for adoption.

From a pure economics standpoint, the prepaid model also tends to produce better net present value for customers than traditional loans when the tax credit differential is properly priced in. That 40% credit isn't incidental — it's the load-bearing wall of the entire value proposition.

Why the Installer Side of This Matters

Solar financing products live or die by installer adoption, and Propel's design reflects an understanding of where dealers actually lose money.

TriBeam's Concert Finance platform is built to connect sales channels directly to capital providers. That's deliberate. Most residential solar financing runs through layers of middlemen — dealer fees, platform fees, hidden costs that get quietly rolled into the loan principal. Installers either absorb these margins or pass them to customers in ways that make proposals less competitive.

Propel's stated goal is to reduce overhead and eliminate hidden fees in the lending process — positioning it as a tool that can help dealers close deals that might otherwise fall apart on price. Greentech Renewables is handling national distribution and logistics for installers on the platform, which removes another operational friction point.

The leadership structure reinforces this installer-first orientation. SolSource brought in Chris Couture as CEO — a former VP of Customer Financing at Enphase and a SunPower veteran. Couture has lived the complexity of residential solar sales at scale. He understands that the best financing product in the world fails if the installer experience is clunky.

The Enphase partnership extends the operational value further. Design and proposals run through Solargraf, and operations and maintenance are covered by Enphase Care. For a smaller installer without an in-house service team, that's a meaningful liability they're not carrying.

The Bigger Picture for Homeowners and the Market

Propel's launch is arriving at an inflection point. The expiration of the residential ITC has already begun reshaping consumer demand curves, and the industry is actively searching for structures that maintain economic viability without the subsidy that powered the last decade of residential growth.

TPO structures — long considered a workhorse of the commercial solar market — are being rediscovered as a viable residential tool precisely because they preserve access to commercial-rate tax incentives. Propel is not the first product to attempt this, but the combination of domestic content compliance, a national hardware partner, fixed payment structures, and a defined purchase option makes it one of the more complete executions of the concept.

Hudson Sustainable Group, which backs SolSource, has deployed more than $13 billion across sustainable energy assets since 2007. That's not a startup bet — that's an experienced infrastructure investor making a calculated move that residential solar financing needs to be rebuilt around the incentives that still exist, not the ones that expired.

For homeowners considering solar in 2026, the calculus has shifted. Chasing a loan product that no longer carries an ITC is a worse deal than it was two years ago. Prepaid solar financing structures that preserve access to commercial tax incentives — and price those benefits transparently — deserve serious consideration before signing anything.

The expiration of the residential credit didn't close the door on affordable residential solar. It just changed which structures fit through the frame.

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