If You’re in Houston, The Cost of Solar is Just Right (Incentives, Tax Rebates, and more!)

A lot has happened in the solar world over the past few years.

The government renewed massive tax breaks for homeowners that want to install solar panels on their homes.

The price of solar panel equipment continues to decline.

Basically, it just makes sense at this point to install alternative energy sources on your home.

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Solar Power in Houston: A Debriefing

Just an hour of sunlight generates sufficient solar panel energy to power the world’s homes for a complete year. Texas has plenty of sunlight, but solar electricity generation in the state as a whole lags because state policies do not strongly support solar. But Texas is a big state and there is lots of room in it for communities to do their own thing. The City of Houston does the rest of the state one better with its own pro-solar programs. And, when you add in the Federal pro-solar programs and the falling cost of photovoltaic equipment, you can save a lot of money by going solar.

Plus, switching to renewable energy generation is the right thing to do. It’s good for the planet, good for your finances, and since fossil-fuel-based energy generation is sure to get ever more expensive going forward, it’s good for the economy as a whole. The more people go solar, the easier it will be for other people to follow your lead.

Texas can be a difficult place to go solar, since it has no net metering law, no RPS law, and no solar carve-out. The interconnectedness policy is decent, meaning that setting up your system is fairly straight-forward, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Texas has no solar tax exemption, but then the state has no income tax at all so it can’t have tax exemptions for anything so that doesn’t really count. Electricity prices are relatively low, which is bad news for two reasons. First, low prices usually mean that a lot of the power comes from coal, which has pretty much the worst carbon footprint. Second, low prices mean that your savings from solar panels are not as dramatic—they are still significant, however, and likely to get better over time as energy prices inevitably rise.

But there are some bright spots, especially in Houston. Texas does have a great property tax exemption; all of the value your solar system adds to your property is tax free. And despite the lack of a statewide net-metering law, some utility companies, including some that operate in Houston, do pay for additional solar electricity generation, at least up to a certain point. And many Houston offer their own rebate program for solar equipment.