How solar co-ops help lower costs

But when she chose to install solar panels at her home in 2023, instead of relying solely on her own industry insight to find an installer, she joined a solar cooperative. Since switching, she now only pays $5 in monthly energy bills instead of $300 during the summer.

But perhaps it’s precisely her knowledge about the industry that steered her toward joining a co-op.

“If you are making a $30,000 purchase, you need to put in the effort to make sure that you're doing your homework,” Johnson said. “If you don't have the time for that but you want solar, a co-op is a really good way to go.”

Outfitting a home with solar panels — to take advantage of Arizona’s sunny weather nearly year-round — is no small investment and no straightforward process. There are myriad specs to decide, contract minutiae to parse, a plethora of permits to apply for. The process can take months before the first ray of sunshine turns into usable power.

This is where solar co-ops can help, their supporters say. Solar co-ops are neighbors banding together to solarize simultaneously, a way to secure bulk discounts from installers.

They also pool expertise and opinion in selecting their common installer. They lean on experts to navigate the complexities of red tape, and on each other to compare notes and tackle the decisions that necessarily come with revamping entire home energy systems.

In Arizona, solar co-ops are coordinated by the national nonprofit Solar United Neighbors. Since it took root in 2019, it has helped over 600 homes adopt solar.

These days, homeowners hoping to go solar have a steeper and rockier hill to climb. Utilities are raising the interconnect fees. Due to inflation and geopolitical tensions, costs are on the rise. Most consequentially, the federal government ended tax credits for home energy and efficiency upgrades, further weakening the appeal of parking panels on roofs.

Even before the tax credits expired, solar co-ops were instrumental in increasing the number of homes powered with panels and advocating for solar-friendly policies around the country.

Now, as costs jump, they’re important for filling in the informational and economic gap to help more Arizonans go solar. Doing as they always have, they’re continuing to disperse the seeds of solar one neighborhood at a time.

Tilting the economics toward the consumer

Professionally run co-ops can help customers probe their options and analyze the math of investing in residential solar, which can cost as much as a luxury car.

Every year, Solar United Neighbors puts out calls for members for a new local co-op, usually in the urban centers of Phoenix, Tucson or Flagstaff, where denser housing makes it easier to stir up geographic interest.

Homeowners can join for free without committing to any purchases until they sign a contract with their installer. A co-op usually receives about 100 registrants every cycle.

Co-ops then invite bids from solar businesses. A members' committee picks a single installer, weighing factors such as price competitiveness, customer service and historical reviews, while also locking in bulk discounts for everyone.

Joining a solar co-op is among the last ways to secure some cuts on the price tag after the death of the tax credits.

“People are desperate for any sort of savings they can get on a solar system. Our bulk discounts are at least something,” said Adrian Keller, the Arizona program director of Solar United Neighbors.

Members get an average of 15% off the price tag if they join a co-op, compared with shopping solo. Solar United Neighbors also provides grants up to $1,500 for income-qualified households.

The biggest hurdle to going solar is the upfront cost, and in the past few months, policy shifts and economic turmoil are raising that bar.

Chief among these movements is the One Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to clean energy projects, on both utility-scale undertakings and home-level improvements. Prior to Jan 1, 2026, homeowners could claim a federal tax credit for newly installed solar panels and batteries, up to 30% of the cost.

Under the Biden Administration, these residential clean energy credits were initially set to expire in 2032, until the Trump administration ended them early.

Homeowners are feeling the sting of higher upfront costs for panels.

“Losing that 30% is a really big deal,” Johnson said.

Keller noted that interest in the co-op program has fallen somewhat, due to the expiration of the tax credits.

More geopolitical forces batter rooftop solar’s expansion. Last year, homeowners had to contend with several waves of tariffs — and threats of tariffs — that raised prices on solar imports. At the start of the year, the federal government introduced new requirements for installers to source their materials outside foreign adversary countries. This has created some supply chain chaos as installers who primarily lease out panels scrambled to understand the ambiguous new rule.

Residents are navigating the ripple effects of an industry that’s also undergoing its own upheaval. Several major players have declared bankruptcy, including the country’s second-largest residential installer. These folded companies have left their customers with 25-year warranties hanging, adding uncertainty for prospective customers hoping to make the same leap but fearing the same fate.

Projections say that the solar industry will feel the bite of these challenges. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that the national residential solar market will tumble 21% this year from the last, and Arizona’s residential demand is expected to see a similar decline.

In the first quarter alone, total solar installations across the country dropped 42% from the end of 2025, with the residential segment shrinking 15%, as customers raced to make good on the sunsetting federal clean energy tax credits before the year’s end.

Other benefits of solar co-ops

Prospective buyers face a tangle of decisions to make on their home energy system, from the number of panels to the type of inverter to where they should park their batteries, should they desire them.

Navigating all those choices can be daunting and stressful. Co-op boosters say joining a community of other potential buyers who likely have similar questions can make the process feel less like they’re wading through the informational thicket alone.

The benefits of a co-op membership come not just in the form of discounts, but also some consumer protection. Solar United Neighbors offers guidance for beginners, contract reviews and roof assessments — all free — before the consumer signs a monetary agreement with an installer.

“There's just so much information out there these days,” says Kate Bowman, the Interior West regulatory director at the advocacy nonprofit Vote Solar. She calls the co-op model “a really helpful way to break through the noise and make people feel like they're learning about solar from a resource that they trust.”

With their multitude of connections, co-ops can oil the path toward landing a reputable installer. That's how Paul Petrash, a 67-year-old disabled veteran, came by his provider, after resisting the door-knocking of solar vendors for years, a common experience of many residents in the Valley.

Although he considers himself well-versed in solar options, the co-op came in handy for vetting his installer, which otherwise wouldn’t have fallen across his radar.

Solar United Neighbors says it isn’t affiliated with any company nor does it receive commissions.

After joining a local co-op facilitated by Solar United Neighbors in February, Petrash signed the papers to install 14 kilowatt-hour solar panels on his rooftop and expanded batteries in his garage. His wife has an aversion for temperatures above 70 F, so cranking his two air conditioners has been a necessity to chill his three-bedroom home during the hot summers.

Given that he’s on a veteran’s pension and social security, the federal tax credits for solar never applied to him. He also thinks that the planet will right itself out of the climate crisis, so solar’s emissions-free quality didn’t factor into his choice.

“I don’t think carbon is a problem,” he said.

Instead, a mix of stoicism and long-term savings drives his decision to pay the full $42,000 for his new electricity system.

Like many households across the country, Petrash is grappling with soaring electricity prices — his costs have shot up more than 30% since 2020, and now, another 14% rate hike by Tucson Electric Power is on the horizon.

Tired of ballooning bills, Petrash decided to wean off the grid to meet his power needs. Every month, Petrash will pay around $350 per month for the bank loan for his energy system. He was already paying up to $400 per month to his utility during the summers anyway.

He looks forward to the day he no longer gives Tucson Electric Power a dime above the $25 monthly flat fee.

“I’m not going to play that silly game with TEP,” he said. “I like the idea of not being dependent on TEP or anybody else.”

A co-op brings rooftop solar to rural corners

Co-ops have helped solar energy make inroads into rural strongholds too unprofitable for local installers to set up shop there. These remote communities often lie in counties hostile to utility-scale solar, which in some cases have instituted a regional ban. Mounting panels at home remains one of the few avenues for residents looking to tap into renewables.

One case in southeastern corner of Arizona is an example of what co-ops can do.

There are many perks to living at the doorstep of Cave Creek Canyon — “this little heavenly piece of southern Arizona,” as Portal resident Paul Hirt calls it — save one major inconvenience: Electricity goes out all the time. Residents are served by a customer-owned rural electric co-op with little cash to spare for hardening its aging transmission lines.

The kind of people who live here love nature enough to accept the trouble of driving 70 miles to reach the nearest grocery store, stocking up on freezable supplies during each trip. Power outages can be an expensive problem. When the monsoon rains pound, residents can experience up to 40 power interruptions in a month.

In 2014, a major flood kept power at bay for around 10 days. When power returned, residents found that most of their frozen food haul had spoiled.

When Hirt and his wife moved to Portal permanently in 2020, they looked to solar and batteries to skirt the staccato of grid power. But no installer was interested in coming out to service this lone household in the middle of nowhere.

With the aid of Solar United Neighbors, Hirt rallied his neighbors to form a co-op. They hoped a larger customer base could tempt a solar installer to travel here. In the first few months, 37 people expressed interest in joining.

“I thought we'd be lucky to get a dozen,” Hirt said.

By 2022, 17 members had completed solar installations, with half of them adding batteries. Hirt got the full package, which now fulfils all his energy needs.

“I've only had to change my clocks one time in five years, instead of 10 or 20 times every summer,” Hirt said.

The Portal residents enjoyed the usual co-op benefits of cheaper quotes and community safety. One member, who started out DIY-ing his own installer search, eventually went with the co-op's choice, whose winning bidder offered a $6,000-cheaper price tag for the system he wanted.

Hirt estimates that without the co-op, at most three to five homes in Portal, including his own, would stomach the hassle to finish a solar install on their own. Moreover, the co-op contractor, Tucson-based Icon Power, has continued to service the region, installing solar in another five households since the co-op wrapped up.

The Portal co-op is one of the few, if not only, rural groups of its kind in Arizona. The co-op took one resident’s initiative, but Hirt thinks that the co-op structure can easily take root elsewhere, federal tax credit or none. That’s because there’s already a growing appetite for energy independence among sparsely populated communities.

Rural dwellers like knowing they’re self-sufficient, and that their basic needs are not inadvertently enriching for-profit corporations. People like Petrash, who feel that utilities could be taking advantage of their basic needs to power their homes.

“In rural areas all over the state of Arizona, I don't think it would be too hard to convince people to join,” Hirt said. The solar momentum would only require the smallest push — perhaps in the form of a co-op — to roll.

Despite headwinds, will solar energy persist?

More cloudy days for rooftop solar lie ahead.

Utilities’ fee schedule changes have watered down the economic argument for purchasing panels. A few years ago, Arizona eliminated net metering — the ability of consumers to sell electricity their roof generates at the same price as they buy it from the utility — dragging out the timeline of solar adopters to recoup their investments.

Now, utilities are poised to further slash the export prices of residential solar power up to 10% every year for new customers, pending Corporation Commission approval.

The current export prices already sit at the bottom of the barrel. APS customers usually pay 11 cents per kilowatt-hour, but can only sell their excess solar at half that rate. SRP customers receive two to three cents per kilowatt-hour for exported solar. With this current rate, the break-even period on solar installations in SRP-serviced homes can stretch up to 20 years.

“When I talk to a lot of solar installers in the Valley, they don't even bother trying to sell to SRP customers,” Keller said.

According to a statement from SRP to The Republic, the utility sets its price plans “to be just and reasonable to all customers, and to minimize any cost shift from one class of customers to another.”

In 2024, APS tacked on a grid access charge for solar customers hooking their panels to the grid. It was a revival of its decades-long policy of charging solar adopters roughly $100 a year, before the corporation commission struck it down in 2021.

Solar advocates and the state attorney general have sued to challenge the Corporation Commission’s approval of the new grid access fee, which the plaintiffs claimed is “discriminatory” to solarized households.

Now, APS is looking to double that fee this year, on top of a looming 14% rate hike.

“What's stopping them from increasing it again next year, then next year?” Keller asked. “We're also concerned that other utilities are going to try to copycat.”

Responding to The Republic's request for comment, APS said that the existence of the grid access charge and the impending raise is to align rates to the costs of serving its customers, including solar-equipped households that are also hooked to the grid.

In its statement, SRP said that it currently has no plans to impose a similar fee, though that might change in the future if it needs to recover costs.

As a silver lining, the same price gouging actions by the utilities may be inadvertently driving some customers into the arms of solar.

“The reality is that it's cheaper to produce your own energy. It's like growing your own food — you could grow food in a garden way cheaper than going to the store,” said Andrew Hoesly, the general manager of SolarTech, an installer that services California and Arizona.

Overall, how these multitude of trends impact rooftop solar in Arizona — “it’s a complex question with a complex answer,” Hoesly said. Still, he thinks the sun will rise again on the market, regardless of the short-term bumps. “The industry is very creative and very scrappy, and we will adapt to whatever's thrown at us,” adding, “the world is hungry for energy, and that’s never going to change.”

With or without the tax credits, experts say that renewables are economically attractive, because unlike fossil fuels, sunshine is free. Solar installers and groups believe this: Perhaps the tax credits, utility resistance and even the nudges from solar co-ops themselves are tiny sways in the face of solar’s barreling force — especially in this sunny state — ripples to the wave that they insist is all but inevitable.