Most solar financing contracts have an arbitration clause buried in them, and most homeowners assume that clause is the end of the conversation — sign the contract, and you've signed away your right to ever see a courtroom. A recent federal case out of California is a good reminder that assumption isn't always true.
In Lewis v. Regions Bank a/k/a EnerBank, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, the plaintiff alleges that a door-to-door sales team forged their signature on a multi-decade solar financing agreement. On May 5, 2026, the court denied EnerBank's motion to compel arbitration — meaning the case gets to proceed in an actual courtroom, not a private arbitration room, at least for now.
EnerBank itself is worth knowing about if you don't already: it's one of the largest home improvement point-of-sale lenders in the country, financing work through a network of over 10,000 contractors before Regions Bank acquired it in 2021. It still operates loans under both names, so if your paperwork says EnerBank, Regions Bank, or both, you're dealing with the same lender.
Here's why the arbitration ruling matters beyond this one case. Courts generally do favor sending disputes to arbitration when a valid agreement to arbitrate exists — that's usually an uphill fight for a consumer to avoid. But an arbitration clause only binds you if you actually, knowingly agreed to it. If the underlying signature on the contract is disputed as forged, there's a real argument that no valid agreement to arbitrate ever existed in the first place, which is a fundamentally different question than whether the arbitration clause itself is fair. That's not just a technicality — it's the difference between fighting your case in front of a private arbitrator selected under rules the lender's contract wrote, or in front of a judge.
We've written before about a similar principle in
Cabatit v. Sunnova, where a California appeals court threw out an arbitration clause entirely because the homeowners were never given a copy of what they signed or had it explained to them.
This EnerBank case is a different flavor of the same underlying idea: an arbitration clause isn't automatically ironclad just because it's printed in the contract. If something was seriously wrong with how you came to "sign" that contract in the first place — whether that's non-disclosure, or something as extreme as a forged signature — that's worth a real look before you assume arbitration is your only option.
If you have a loan with EnerBank or Regions Bank and something about your signing process doesn't sit right with you — you don't remember signing certain pages, the signature doesn't look like yours, or you were never actually present for part of the paperwork — that's a specific, documentable red flag worth raising, not something to shrug off.
Have concerns about how your solar financing contract was actually signed? Get a free, no-pressure review. Call (213) 579-5156 or visit californiasolarexit.com.
Daniel Merritt is a Senior Solar Contract Analyst at California Solar Exit.
