A financier for the rooftop, not an installer
John Berger founded Sunnova in Houston in 2012 with a financing-first thesis: rather than knock on doors itself, it would underwrite and service rooftop solar and batteries sold by a national network of independent dealers. Homeowners paid little or nothing upfront and signed long-dated loans, leases, or power-purchase agreements, while Sunnova held the customer relationship and the cash flows. The model promised utility-scale balance-sheet economics applied to hundreds of thousands of individual roofs.
IPO and the clean-energy bull run
Sunnova went public on the NYSE in July 2019 at $12 a share, raising roughly $168M gross and serving about 63,000 customers across some 20 states and territories. The 2020 clean-energy rally then lifted its market capitalization to a peak of about $4.4 billion by year-end. Cheap capital was the engine of the model, and for a few years it ran hot.