Sunrun, a publicly traded solar company, is dialing back its Colorado operations.
The San Francisco-based firm is laying off approximately 100 people, the majority of whom work in an Arvada office, Sunrun spokesman Wyatt Semaneck said in an email. He added that represents about 1 percent of the company’s overall workforce.
Sunrun also will not take on any new projects in the state, a sales representative told BusinessDen on Wednesday. The representative added that his team received the message earlier in the week.
The company has built and leased solar panels in the Centennial State since its founding in 2007. It went public in 2015 and said it services 17 states and Puerto Rico.
Pete Frost worked for Sunrun from 2019 to 2022, and now consults full-time through his own solar company, Avasol. He said roles affected include project managers, installers and sales representatives.
“They are completing all the projects they have on the books, and their service contracts will be taken care of like usual, which is not necessarily by them,” Frost said. He said he keeps in touch with many of his former colleagues at Sunrun and still works closely with the company.
“They’ll farm that out and they already have partners in place,” he said of the maintenance crew.
Frost said he’s been told the Arvada branch, where the Colorado sales and install team works, is getting “removed and gutted.” Sunrun’s Semaneck, however, maintained that the office at 5525 W. 56th Ave., which also has a warehouse, will remain.
“While we will be discontinuing some Colorado operations, we are not closing any offices,” he said.
Frost said Sunrun and Costco ending a sales deal in September was a catalyst for the cuts. The company also ended a similar agreement with Home Depot in early 2024, though it did come to terms to sell out of Lowes soon after, according to Semaneck.
“They tried to be scrappy and work their way around it, but they just couldn’t get their numbers to make sense for customer acquisition,” Frost said.
Ron Maurer, a consultant for California-based solar company Powur, said the Colorado market is a difficult one — something that may have factored into Sunrun’s decision to scale back.
“Colorado is kind of a tough market for solar anyway,” said Maurer, who worked for Sunrun from 2018 to 2021. “We don’t think of it that way because we have 300 days of sunshine, but because we’re lower utility cost than many other areas, there’s not as much savings. The higher the utility price, the more benefits people can enjoy (from solar).”
While Frost agrees with that assessment, he still doesn’t understand the exit. Most of his customers get a return on their investment within three to seven years, he said.
“It’s mind-boggling,” he said.
Each of their firms are already in talks to hire some of the now-former Sunrun staff, many whom they worked with over their decades in the industry.
“They’re gonna be gobbled up,” Frost said. “They’re really good at what they do.”
Arvada is not Sunrun’s most prominent real estate in Colorado. The company also has a 118,000-square-foot office at 717 17th St. in downtown Denver, which it leased in 2019 — a big enough deal that Gov. Jared Polis attended the ribbon-cutting. Frost said the corporate team works out of the space, handling national accounts.
When a BusinessDen reporter visited the downtown office on Wednesday, doors were locked, the lights were dimmed and nobody was in sight.
“We still have the downtown office,” Sunrun’s Semaneck said. “Some teams continue to work from that location.”
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