Chadbag will probably chime in as he has the most recent experience and he has a good knowledge of Solar.
Not sure I'm the one to talk, even though we had solar put on the new house last spring/summer. We did not do one of these deals: we paid "cash" (which was from the construction loan which will be part of the long term mortgage once I get another job). And we took the tax credit this year for it. Doing it this way we got the latest panels with amongst the highest wattage per panel, good inverter, etc. Not bottom of the barrel.
My understanding on these deals is that they figure out what your basic electricity usage is, put a system on the house which basically replaces that use (and which may be cheaper material, I don't know), and you basically pay them instead of the electric company until you've paid it off. I would suspect any incentives from your local state or utility or Fed tax credits go to them towards the cost. IDK
Someone else mentioned they put a lien on your house against it.
All I do know is I would only get solar with a direct purchase yourself and not through any of these deals, if you're interested. These deals exist to confuse you and get you to buy things you normally wouldn't. Similar to how a car dealer only tells you the monthly payment, not what the purchase price is. People get confused and think they can afford it because the payment is manageable. They don't understand that the purchase price is high and they're going to be paying for 8-10 years... Just that it has a low payment.
Having said that, if I had the cash I would increase the size of my system. We ended up with about 1/2 the planned system because the costs of the rest of the house kept going up past our ability to absorb them so we had to cut the solar out. But we'd already made some payments as they had a 25% at time of plan approval (ie they designed the system and we agreed), 25% at time of city approval, and two more 25% payments, the last after it was installed. We had done the first two so we got that much money worth of system. I'd like to put more. It really helps with our "electric only" house but we still have to pay a good penny for electricity. (Our house is heated and cooled with electric driven geothermal heat pump, hybrid heat pup/electric hot water, etc. No gas in the house except the boiler in the garage. I didn't grow up with has and don't like it and gas is only going to get more expensive. The driveway snow melt runs off the gas boiler so only when big winter storms come is it used. It can also be used to augment or backup the heat pump but there has been no need since the heat pump went online. Only 3 hours of boiler in almost two months of heat pump use and I think 2 of those three hours were when we first turned the heat pump on, and turned the temperature up in the house by about 4 degrees or so. Heat pumps are slow at changing temperatures and I think the controller turned the boiler on to augment the heat pump to get the temperature up the 4 or 5 degrees I had turned it up. And we were out of town a few days at the beginning of April and as a test I turned the temp down 2 degrees while we were gone. When we got back I turned the temp back up and the controller called for the boiler to augment it. It didn't need the boiler but it used it because it was there and it probably thought we wanted the heat to go up faster than it would with heat pump alone. The rest of the almost 2 months since the heat pump went on it has never called for the boiler, no matter how cold it was outside. It's been able to maintain the temperature in the house just fine. (And when its colder so runs more, it produces more excess heat which we have piped into a pre-holding tank for the hot water heater, so the hot water heater has less work to do in those cases).
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