SunCommon Sues Former Manager Who Defected to Competitor

Vermont residential solar installer SunCommon, a brand trying to regain its footing in the wake of its parent company’s 2024 bankruptcy, claims its upstate New York division is in disarray as key employees defect to a new competitor.

The situation is described by company lawyers in a lawsuit that SunCommon filed against its former general manager, Alexander Grayson, who resigned in December and has taken a job at a nearby solar startup, Hudson Solar Solutions.

SunCommon alleges that Grayson broke a one-year noncompete clause in his employment contract. He also brought customer leads to his new employer, which the company claims has jeopardized $19 million in potential sales. Grayson denies both claims.

The complaint was filed last week in Vermont state court and is being transferred to federal court in Burlington. It describes an exodus of SunCommon’s New York employees to Hudson Solar Solutions that extends beyond Grayson.

That company was started last year by Jeff Irish, a former SunCommon vice president. Irish had sold a previous, similarly named solar firm to SunCommon in 2018, which allowed the Vermont company to expand into New York.

Irish’s Hudson Solar Solutions, based in Rhinebeck, N.Y., touts an “expert start-up team” with more than 65 years of industry experience, according to its website.

SunCommon is “bleeding” employees to the new competitor, including its entire maintenance department, lawyers for the company wrote in court filings.

“This has crippled SunCommon’s ability to effectively install new systems,” they wrote.

SunCommon declined to comment on the lawsuit directly. But in an interview, director of sales Mike McCarthy seemed to contradict the idea that the company’s New York operation was in trouble. He said SunCommon has two work crews in the Hudson Valley and recently signed a contract to install a $299,000 rooftop solar array for Central Hudson Gas & Electric, a utility company, in Catskill.

“We are cranking away. We’re up on roofs today,” McCarthy said. “There’s just a good vibe right now at SunCommon,” he added.

SunCommon, headquartered in Waterbury, has been a leading residential solar installer in Vermont since its founding in 2012. The Williston commercial solar and electric utility iSun purchased SunCommon in 2021 for $40 million, then declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last summer.

A Texas private equity firm bought the companies for $10 million and created a new corporate parent called Original Clean Energy. SunCommon has continued to service and sell residential solar arrays in Vermont and New York under its existing brand.

SunCommon wants a judge to order Grayson to quit his job at Hudson Solar Solutions. But the former general manager contends that his noncompete agreement applied to the corporate entity that existed before the bankruptcy sale, SolarCommunities. The new corporation — SunCommon II — has no such contract with him, Grayson’s attorney argues.

In the court filings, Grayson’s attorney wrote that SunCommon had no sales reps and only one marketing employee when he quit in December, down from eight in 2024. Work was drying up, and the company was debating whether to furlough its installation team as a result, he alleged.

Grayson blames SunCommon’s “poor treatment of staff” as “the real cause of its retention problems.”

McCarthy said the company did furlough some employees in January, which he described as a common practice in the industry. Some of those employees did not return, but new people are coming on, McCarthy said.

“I have a lot of confidence in our New York operation because we have good, seasoned people there,” he said.

SunCommon has asked the court to issue an immediate restraining order against Grayson. His lawyer wrote that the litigation was filed “in bad faith as a means of intimidation” and will likely ask the court to sanction SunCommon instead. Grayson’s attorney, John Prendergast of law firm Jackson Lewis, declined to comment.

A hearing has not been set.