EnergyAid acquires Sunworks' customer lists after bankruptcy

Business Journals

24-04-2025

Santa Ana-based residential solar service company EnergyAid has acquired the customer lists and intellectual property of solar power installers that had a long presence in the Sacramento region before going out of business.
Santa Ana-based residential solar service company EnergyAid has acquired the customer lists and intellectual property of solar power installers that had a long presence in the Sacramento region before going out of business.
EnergyAid, which only does service on solar systems, acquired the intellectual assets of Sunworks Inc., a solar installer founded locally in 2002 that filed for bankruptcy in January this year.
EnergyAid is offering services 'to customers who have been abandoned by their installers,' said Bryan Jackson, vice president of sales and marketing with EnergyAid.
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EnergyAid already had a Sacramento office, where 15 of the company's 100 employees work. The company has seven offices in California and one in Arizona. Sacramento is its second-largest office, Jackson said.
In 2021, Roseville-based Sunworks bought Solcius, a Utah-based residential solar installer, in a cash deal valued at $51.8 million. Solcius worked in 12 states. Sunworks later that year moved its headquarters to Utah, but it still had installers in Sacramento until the bankruptcy.
Sunworks, when it was still a publicly traded company based in Roseville, installed the solar photovoltaic system on what is now Sutter Health Park, home of the River Cats and now the Athletics. Several times, Sunworks was one of the region's fastest-growing companies. It was the fourth-fastest-growing in 2016.
'A lot of unfortunate things have been happening in the solar industry,' Jackson said.
The solar install business has been difficult in recent years because high interest rates have made installations less affordable. Also, permitting cycles from local governments got longer with the pandemic and remain so today. And some installation incentives have expired or just gone away. In California, the net metering rules changed in 2023 to make the value of electricity sold to the grid less than what it had been for the previous decade. Also, equipment and labor costs have escalated with increasing competition, he said.
EnergyAid started up in 2014 to service residential solar systems, many of which came with warranties from installers that have now gone out of business.
EnergyAid didn't buy any hard assets from Sunworks, and it didn't pick up any employees through the bankruptcy purchase, Jackson said. He declined to say how much it paid for the intellectual property.
Between home ownership changes and failing installers, many homeowners don't know who to turn to for service, Jackson said.
EnergyAid can help homeowners find out if they have a warranty from the panel or equipment manufacturers, and the company does work to update technology on residential solar systems. Many older systems run on 3G cellular networks, and they are no longer supported by carriers, which means that they aren't optimized, and the monitoring of the system may no longer work.
The panels in a photovoltaic array tend to be the most reliable component. If there are no immediate problems, they tend to last a long time, Jackson said. They do, however, need to be cleaned. The wiring, connections and inverters tend to be longer-term trouble spots.
EnergyAid's business model is that it will become a trusted service provider, and then as people upgrade and expand their system over years, it will be able to help those customers add more power, battery backup and support power and install electric vehicle charging.