Solar in El Paso County

Inside Colorado Springs city limits, electricity comes from Colorado Springs Utilities, a city-owned utility. On September 22, 2026, its board voted 7–2 to restructure net metering for new solar customers: they will choose between a $1-per-day fee paired with time-of-use pricing (on-peak 5–9 pm on weekdays, with exports credited in dollars rather than kilowatt-hours) or a demand charge based on the prior month’s highest 15-minute usage, with exports credited kilowatt-hour for kilowatt-hour. Existing solar customers — more than 11,000 of them — get roughly a five-year grace period.

Falcon, Peyton, Black Forest, Calhan and much of the Tri-Lakes area are Mountain View Electric Association territory. MVEA is a member-owned co-op, and Colorado’s co-op net-metering statute sets its floor: at least 10 kW for homes and 25 kW for businesses, with monthly excess carried forward one-for-one and annual excess credited within 60 days. Palmer Lake and parts of the Monument area sit in CORE Electric Cooperative territory, and the City of Fountain runs its own electric utility.

The practical point: two neighbors on either side of a utility boundary can get quotes for identical systems with very different payback. We confirm the utility from your bill before we size anything.

The new CSU structure rewards systems sized to what the house uses in real time, not systems sized to bank credits. Under the time-of-use option, a kilowatt-hour exported at noon is worth less than one you avoid buying at 6 pm. Under the demand option, a single high-usage quarter hour — say, the dryer, oven and an EV charger all at once — sets a charge for the month whether or not the sun is shining.

The start date for new installations and the exact grandfathering rules still need confirming against CSU’s final tariff, so we don’t promise anyone the old terms. If you are already mid-project, ask for CSU’s interconnection approval date in writing. If you are just starting, we model both new options side by side with your own 12 months of usage before recommending panels, a battery, or waiting.

Pikes Peak Regional Building Department issues permits for Colorado Springs, unincorporated El Paso County, Fountain, Manitou Springs, Monument, Palmer Lake, Green Mountain Falls, Calhan and Woodland Park in neighboring Teller County. One set of rules across that whole area is a real convenience compared to the Denver metro’s patchwork.

PPRBD asks for written utility approval before it reviews a solar permit, and if a battery is part of the job, that approval has to mention it. Plans must show roof access pathways and racking designed to the county’s criteria: 30 psf flat-roof snow load below 7,000 feet, 40 psf above it, and 130 mph design wind speed. SolarAPP+ automated permitting is not used here, so expect a conventional plan review.

Colorado Springs and the plains east of it sit squarely in the Front Range hail belt, where the season runs roughly mid-April through mid-September. Modern certified modules are tested against 25 mm ice balls, which covers most storms but not the largest stones, so we treat homeowner’s-insurance coverage for the array as part of the design conversation, not an afterthought.

Monument Hill and the Palmer Divide get noticeably more snow than the city below, which is why PPRBD steps its snow-load requirement up above 7,000 feet. Racking layout, panel tilt and where snow slides off the array onto walkways all deserve attention on Tri-Lakes and Black Forest homes.

The Waldo Canyon Fire in 2012 and the Black Forest Fire in 2013 made wildfire a lived experience here, on the mountain edge and in the ponderosa forest northeast of the city alike. For homes on wells in Black Forest or the far east, an outage means no water as well as no lights, and that shifts the value of battery backup in a way it doesn’t for a city lot.

Batteries don’t prevent evacuations, and nothing we install makes a house fire-safe. What storage can do is keep a well pump, furnace blower, refrigerator and medical equipment running through a multi-day outage — if it is sized for those loads and not for a brochure.