Office location: 577 Main Street Suite 430, Hudson MA, 01749
07/19/2022
Jim Luckett
Waltham, MA
I just had NECE install a second system and battery. Nice people. Flexible enough to take on an unusual project. But not at all the customer-friendly, capable company they were when they did my first system. I can no longer recommend them. I contracted for the system in Feb of 2020. They forgot to apply for permits and so we lost many months until the oversight was discovered. It took until September of 2021 to get it physically installed and the bureaucratic approvals still have not come through (as of July 2022), so I am not getting Smart Credits and my battery is not earning any income. NECE's person for pushing through the paperwork is either completely overwhelmed or incompetent. She just is not getting it done. Worse, she does not return phone calls or emails promptly and is not always accurate when she finally does. I finally had to call Eversource and the city inspector myself to do her job for her. I did that today and we seem to be moving forward now. She has not communicated at all today, nor for the previous week plus. Backing up to the construction process, NECE arrived on site and started work without having the system fully designed and approved by their structural engineer. They discovered as they worked that they could not get their engineer to perform. I finally had to contract with another engineer for design and approval of the sloping panels that went along the south edge of my deck. Then NECE hit me with a change order because their pricing was based on false assumptions about what was structurally acceptable and the structually sound solution was more costly. They would not honor the price in their fixed-price contract with me. Moving back to the post-construction situation, it has been an endless process of emails and phone calls to NECE not being answered in a timely manner, and stuff they said they were doing not being done or not done correctly. For example, one big delay resulted because they submitted my system for approval as a wind system! In July, when I finally called the city inspector who they were blaming for the latest delay of many weeks, he said he had not known there was any problem and had received zero communication from NECE between February and July of this year (2022). So NECE was just BSing me about all the supposed interaction they were having with him. So disappointing to see a good company go bad.
System size (kW): 8500
System price: $50,677
Year installed: 2021
Price include the Federal Tax Credit or incentives: No
New England Clean Energy reply
08/04/2022
We are sorry this project has been so frustrating. It has been frustrating for us as well. That said, we are happy to report that you now have Permission to Operate (PTO) your system and it is now operational. It was, from the start, an extremely unusual project – and so unusual in fact that it has changed how we take on the installation of anything “new and different”. It was a mistake on our part that we will not make again.
Some of these “new and different” components were so foreign that our regular structural engineers would not approve them, so you had to get your own engineer to take on the task. So, we feel that change orders and delays were not overly surprising. Simply put, much of the work was unknowable from the start. That said, we do accept that your initial Project Lead made mistakes and omissions. He did it to multiple customers unfortunately. We can only confirm that the project lead in question was let go.
Overall, however, we believe you became most upset with us after we asked you to call your town inspector. Specifically, after months of trying we could not reach him or get a response so we asked you – as a town resident to try. When you did reach him (it pays to be a town resident), he told you that no one had ever contacted him, and he would be happy to properly notify the utility. Unfortunately, that was not true.
In truth, we contacted the inspector multiple times over multiple months, by phone as well as by email. This is all documented in our systems. And multiple people at our company tried to reach him; our project lead tried to reach him, and our Master Electrician tried to reach him. Even the utility, Eversource, tried to reach him (which Eversource has also documented). The inspector’s statement to the contrary would indeed be upsetting, but it also is not true.
We do not know why the inspector didn’t respond to us, but we do know that many inspectors are confused by the strange process Eversource requires. Specifically, while any project an inspector must approve requires only the inspector’s signature, larger solar projects also require the inspector to call Eversource at a very specific number as well. If he didn’t know that perhaps he felt that we were in the wrong and needlessly bothering him. It is impossible for us to know for sure.
In the end, as noted above, your system has been approved and is operational. We agree it has been a frustrating experience and we wish it would have gone a different way. If it is any solace, while it does not go back and eliminate your frustration, our processes have changed dramatically since then.
And as always, thank you for going solar. We truly appreciate it.