Solar decommissioning bonds.
From $275. Enter your amount.
A growing number of counties, states, land leases, and interconnection agreements require a solar project to post financial security for decommissioning — removing panels, racking, inverters, and foundations, and restoring the site — before the project can be built or its land-use permit issued. There is no single national rule: your permit, your land lease, or your obligee's own decommissioning agreement sets the requirement and names the party the bond runs to. Premium is priced at 5% of the bond amount plus a $25 fee, $275 floor — enter the removal cost estimate your obligee requires and your exact price appears at the application.
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Apply to filed in one sitting.
A decommissioning bond at a routine amount is ordinary commercial surety once your removal cost estimate is in hand. Here is the whole thing:
Apply online
Your entity type and FEIN, whether the site is residential, rooftop, or carport solar, your removal cost estimate (and whether it nets out salvage value), years until decommissioning, whether the land is leased or owned, the obligee or beneficiary name and address your agreement specifies, and the agreement date. The program's own instruction is to enter 111111 in the SSN field — the application includes a credit consent, but it authorizes a soft pull only.
Issued the moment you pay
The program is built to skip a hard credit review entirely. Larger removal-cost amounts, or a site the underwriter wants documents for, can draw a short review before the bond releases — send your decommissioning agreement, land lease, and permit paperwork if asked.
File it with your obligee
Your executed bond and power of attorney arrive by email, ready to file with the county, state, landowner, or interconnection obligee named in your permit or agreement. Wet-ink originals mailed on request.
What it is and who needs it.
What the solar decommissioning bond actually guarantees
Decommissioning security exists because a solar array is a long-lived asset built on someone else's land or under someone else's permit, and eventually — at the end of a lease, a power purchase agreement, or the equipment's useful life — it has to come down. A growing list of counties, states, land-lease agreements, and interconnection utilities condition approval on the developer posting funds up front to guarantee that removal happens, rather than leaving a landowner or a local government to pay for it or live with an abandoned array.
This bond is project-specific by design: the field for the obligee's name and address is left for the applicant to fill in, because the party the bond runs to — a county planning department, a state energy office, a landowner under a lease, or an interconnecting utility — varies by project and by jurisdiction. Whichever body required decommissioning security is the obligee; you are the principal; the surety is the third party. It is not insurance for you — if the obligee draws on the bond to fund removal, you repay the surety.
There is no single statutory bond amount. Your permit condition, land lease, or decommissioning agreement sets the required removal cost estimate — often net of salvage value the equipment would still be worth — and that figure, not a nationwide formula, is what determines your bond amount. Confirm it with the obligee that required the security before you apply.
You need this bond if you are
One application, issued the moment you pay.
These are the actual issuing fields — entity type and FEIN, your removal cost estimate, years until decommissioning, land lease or ownership status, and the obligee name and address your permit or agreement specifies. No hard credit check runs on this bond.
Start the application →Common questions.
Other Federal bonds.
Clear your decommissioning condition today.
From $275, priced at 5% of the bond amount plus a $25 fee. Enter your removal cost estimate and file with your obligee the same day. Free until issued.