Solar Liberty

Get the quote. Solar Liberty is the most heavily documented installer in our Buffalo research, and the documentation is government data, not marketing. The legal entity is Solar Liberty Energy Systems, Inc., a domestic business corporation filed with the New York Department of State on September 18, 2003, DOS ID 2955307, Erie County. That date matches the company story: the anniversary blog says brothers Adam and Nathan Rizzo began Solar Liberty in 2003 and were installing by 2005. Six related active entities carry the same brand, including a Canadian arm, an electric company, a supply company, a franchising company, and a not-for-profit foundation, with filings from 2008 to 2018. That is the footprint of a business that has been around long enough to sprawl.

Licensing in New York works differently from California or Arizona, so read this part slowly. New York has no statewide contractor license. Erie County says plainly that licensing is handled at the municipal level, and the City of Buffalo has required contractor registration since 1989 with a separate license for electricians. The City of Buffalo open data portal lists two active licenses under Solar Liberty Energy Systems: Specialty Contractor SPC11-550063 under applicant Adam Rizzo, expiring September 30, 2026, and Master Electrician MEL22-10061559 under applicant Lance Lombardo, expiring December 31, 2027. The second one is the license that matters most. Solar Liberty holds the electrical credential directly under its own business name rather than borrowing a subcontractor's. One timing note: the specialty contractor license expires five days after this data pull. Renewal is routine, but ask to see the renewed record if you sign after that date. The other half of the New York lane is NYSERDA's NY-Sun program. We could not read the NYSERDA contractor directory, which is a JavaScript application that rendered empty, so we went to the official NYSERDA project dataset instead. It lists 3,184 completed projects with Solar Liberty as contractor of record across three spellings of the name, 2,623 residential and 561 non-residential, with an application as recent as March 7, 2026. That is verified volume of the kind most profiles on this site never get.

Now the gaps, because there are two. First, no workmanship warranty duration appears on the homepage, about page, services page, or the anniversary blog. A company this size almost certainly has one in its contract, and a NY Department of Public Service filing that appears to contain its installation agreement was located but not read for this profile. Until it is, the warranty is unknown, and an unknown warranty cannot earn an A. Second, the company's NYSERDA Quality Solar Installer claim, its SEIA membership, and its NABCEP-certified installer claim are company-side and trade-association statements, not records we verified. The complaint record is thin in the good way: BBB shows 2 complaints in the last 3 years, 1 closed in the last 12 months, not accredited, no rating letter in the fetched content. The May 2026 complaint deserves a read before you sign. It concerned yard restoration after trenching and a non-reporting microinverter, and the President's response stated the system had Permission to Operate, that roughly $4,300 of the contract balance was withheld, and that warranty service was conditioned on payment. Whatever you think of that stance, it tells you how a dispute over a final balance will go. No enforcement action names the company. The only court case found has Solar Liberty as the plaintiff, a qui tam suit over allegedly faulty inverters in the Western District of New York, and the March 2026 New York Attorney General solar suit names a different company entirely. Solar Liberty did not appear on the 2026 Solar Power World national or New York lists; the number one in New York ranking it cites dates to 2018.