Prepaid PPA, lease, loan or cash: what you are actually signing

There are four ways to put solar on a Las Vegas roof: pay cash, borrow the money, lease the equipment, or buy the electricity under a power purchase agreement. One question separates them, and it is not the monthly number. It is who owns the system on the day it switches on.

That one fact decides who claims the federal credit, what your payment does over the years, and what has to happen before you can sell the house.

Start with the prepaid plan, because it is the one least written about.

The prepaid plan, in plain words

A power purchase agreement is defined at NRS 598.9807 as an agreement where a solar installation company arranges the design, installation, maintenance and output of a system, and sells you the electricity it makes. You are not buying panels. You are buying kilowatt hours from equipment that sits on your roof and belongs to somebody else.

A prepaid power purchase agreement changes one thing about that: the payment schedule. Instead of paying monthly for twenty or twenty five years, you pay for the output at the start. Everything else about the structure stays the same, and that is the point most sales conversations skip.

On a prepaid plan the owner of the system keeps it, and monitors, maintains and insures it, for a period the agreement sets, after which it may transfer to you. What happens if you sell the house is likewise a term of the agreement. Those are contract terms, so do not take them from a web page, including this one. They belong on the cover page and in the agreement, and you should have both in your hands before you sign anything.

Three things follow from prepaying, and two of them are in your favor.

There is no escalator, because there is no monthly payment to escalate. The annual percentage increase that homeowners complain about is a feature of a monthly agreement. Pay at the start and the increase has nothing to act on.

The money still cannot be taken early. NRS 598.982185 says a solar installation company shall not accept any payment for the installation before the system receives permission from the utility to connect to the grid, other than an initial deposit capped at $1,000 or 10 percent of the aggregate contract price, whichever is less. That applies to a payment from you, and to a payment from a financier. If anyone asks for the prepayment before permission to operate, they are asking for something the statute does not allow.

The prepayment is usually financed, and that is a second contract. A loan taken to pay for a solar system is its own agreement with its own lender, and Nevada treats it that way. Under NRS 598.98211, the term of the loan and what happens if you die before it is repaid have to be at the top of the first page in at least 16-point font. Read that page. It is not the same document as the power purchase agreement, and it does not cancel itself if you cancel the other one.

A loan is not a PPA, and the pitch often blurs them

Not a lease, not a PPA, you own it once it is paid off. That sentence gets said at a lot of kitchen tables, and what it describes is a loan. It is the most common confusion in this market.

On a loan you own the system from the first day. You own the production, the warranties and the net metering agreement, and you also own every problem. On a lease or a power purchase agreement somebody else owns all of it for the length of the term, and you own none of the problems either. Both can be reasonable. They are not the same thing, and the difference is not the monthly figure.

A loan brings two protections worth knowing. Your cancellation clock is the same as on the solar contract: midnight of the third business day, or the tenth if you are 60 or older, under NRS 598.982149. And under NRS 598.98218, whoever the loan gets sold to takes it subject to the claims and defenses you have against the original financier, up to the amount still owed. A paper trail that moves does not move away from you.

Cash, in a paragraph

You pay the price, you own everything, and there is nothing to transfer when you sell. You also carry every warranty claim yourself, which is why the statutory floors matter: NRS 598.9821 requires a written warranty on the installation and the roof penetrations expiring no earlier than 10 years after installation, not less than 10 years on collectors and storage, and not less than 7 years on inverters. For a purchase, NRS 598.9815 also requires a separate disclosure of not more than 3 pages carrying the first year production estimate, the annual degradation assumption and the basis for any estimate of savings you were shown.

Lease, in a paragraph

You rent the equipment for a monthly payment. NRS 598.9811 requires the lease to state both the monthly payment and the total payments due across the term, excluding taxes, along with any option to buy the system before the end of the term and every option available to you if you sell the house. The term is long, the payment usually escalates, and the credit belongs to the lessor. Read subsection 19 before your listing goes live, not after.

Standard power purchase agreement, in a paragraph

You pay per kilowatt hour for what the system makes, every month, for the term. Compare that rate with what you pay now, not with a pitch: on Schedule RS, effective July 1 2026, NV Energy charges $0.11622 per kWh, $0.11935 all in after riders, plus an $18.00 monthly service charge and a 5 percent Clark County local government fee. You will keep getting a power bill either way, and the cover page has to say so.

The escalator, and the arithmetic nobody does at the table

The objection people raise about these agreements is that the price goes up a set percentage every year, and that the set percentage runs ahead of ordinary inflation. It is a fair objection, and Nevada has already made the number findable. On a power purchase agreement the rate of any increase in the payments, and the date of the first increase, must appear on the cover page under NRS 598.9816, in the contents under NRS 598.9817 subsection 7, and again in the separate disclosure under NRS 598.9818. Three places. If a salesperson cannot point at one of them, the conversation is over.

Then do the multiplication, because an escalator compounds and nobody reads a percentage as compounding.

That table is arithmetic, not a quote from anybody. It assumes one increase a year, the first in year two, and it runs to year 25. Use the row nearest the number in your own agreement and stop at the column that matches your own term. Note what the middle row says: at 2.9 percent the payment in year 25 is near enough double the payment in year one.

An escalator is also not a forecast. It is a promise about your payment, fixed in ink. What the utility does with its rates over the same period is a separate question with a separate answer, and what 75 percent of retail actually costs you explains the part of that answer solar touches.

Who claims the 30 percent credit now

This is the part that changed under everyone's feet, and most of what is written online is a year out of date.

Section 25D, the credit a household claimed on its own purchase, is finished. The IRS page for it now says plainly that the credit is not available for any property placed in service after December 31 2025. A 2026 cash purchase gets nothing from it, and neither does a 2026 purchase on a loan.

Section 48E is still running, and it belongs to whoever owns the system. Its base rate is 6 percent, rising to 30 percent for a facility with a maximum net output of less than 1 megawatt in alternating current, which every house in the valley is by an enormous margin. The statute now says the section does not apply to qualified property placed in service after December 31 2027 that is part of a facility using solar energy, and there is an effective date rule attached to that termination which is worth reading with somebody qualified.

So the credit now reaches a household only through a structure where somebody else owns the array, and it reaches you as price rather than as money. Ask for it as price, in writing, on the same page as the production estimate. The whole of it is worked through in what the federal tax credit is worth to you in 2026. We are a licensed electrical contractor and not tax advisers, so take any of this to an independent tax professional before you rely on it.

What actually happens when you sell

An owned system conveys with the house. A leased or third party owned system has to be assigned to your buyer or paid off, and that clause is written before you ever list.

Nevada requires the clause to exist: NRS 598.9817 subsection 15 for a power purchase agreement and NRS 598.9811 subsection 19 for a lease both require a description of all the options on a sale, including whether the obligations may be transferred to the buyer, the conditions of any such transfer, and the process to pay off what is owed. The separate disclosure at NRS 598.9818 adds two more items worth finding: whether the owner intends to make a fixture filing against the property, and any fee for a notice of removal and refiling. The cover page itself has to tell you that financial covenants on a system affixed to your property may affect the future sale of it, and that you should seek advice from a real estate professional, an attorney or a financial adviser first.

If you are on the other side of that transaction, buying a Las Vegas house that already has solar covers what to ask for before your contingency ends.

Six things that are true whichever one you sign

1. You can cancel. Midnight of the third business day, tenth if you are 60 or older, in writing, under NRS 598.98216. The email address for the cancellation has to be on the cover page in 16-point font.
2. The site survey gives you a second exit. Under NRS 598.982145 the company has to survey your roof and give you the results. If the survey turns up something that raises the price or changes the equipment, you have three business days from receiving it to rescind, and to rescind the loan with it.
3. No real money changes hands before permission to operate. Under NRS 598.982185 the company cannot accept payment for the installation until the utility gives the system permission to connect, and the deposit before that is capped at $1,000 or 10 percent of the aggregate contract price, whichever is less.
4. The cover page conversation is recorded. NRS 598.98213 requires the company to go through the cover page with you verbally, record it, keep it not less than 5 years, and hand you a copy within 10 business days of your asking. If they do not, the agreement is voidable.
5. Marketing cannot say what the contract does not. NRS 598.982186 makes it prohibited conduct to put a material term in marketing material that is not in the agreement itself. The gap between the pitch and the paperwork is not a misunderstanding. It is the violation.
6. An unlicensed signature is reversible. Under NRS 598.982148 a power purchase agreement is voidable for three years if the company was not properly licensed, or was working outside the monetary limit of its license, when you signed. Our license number is at the top of this page. Check it against the Contractors Board before you check anyone else's.

The one page to ask for

Whatever you are being shown, ask for the cover page before the pitch, not after it. For a power purchase agreement, NRS 598.9816 already puts almost everything that matters on that single sheet: the term, the rate of any increase and the date of the first one, the first year rate per kilowatt hour, the amounts due at signing and at completion, the options at the end of the term, any option to buy the system early, what a lead referral was paid for, and whether the person sitting across from you is actually an employee of the licensed contractor.

Read that one page and you will know which of the four you are being offered, which is more than most people know when they sign. If the page is not ready, neither are they.

More of the same ground, from the contract side, is in your rights when you sign a solar contract in Nevada, and the price comparison itself is in how to compare two solar quotes.

We recheck this page quarterly. Last checked 2026-09-20. If a number here has moved, tell us and we will fix it the same week.