Rooftop solar in Texas lives or dies on the details of your utility territory and your retail plan. This brief covers the utilities that shape your bill, what happens to the power you export, where rates are headed, and the incentives still on the table — researched September 2026.
New to the basics? Start with our Texas solar guide, then come back — this page is the market layer underneath it.
The Utilities That Shape Your Bill
In most of Texas, two different companies touch your bill. The wires utilities — Oncor (Dallas–Fort Worth, serving roughly 14 million people), CenterPoint Energy (Houston), AEP Texas, and Texas-New Mexico Power — own the poles and wires and collect delivery charges. The retail electric providers competing across ERCOT (about 85% of the state) sell you the energy and set the terms of any solar buyback plan. Your buyback terms come from your retailer, not the wires company.
Some areas play by their own rules: Austin Energy and CPS Energy (San Antonio) are municipal utilities with their own solar tariffs, separate from the competitive market.
What Happens to Your Surplus Power
Texas has no statewide net-metering mandate. In the competitive ERCOT market, retailers offer solar buyback plans — industry reporting cites roughly 9.5–10¢/kWh from some providers, but plans and rates change, so always check current offers when comparing.
Austin Energy credits all solar production under its Value of Solar tariff: 9.91¢/kWh in 2026, with a proposed reset to 12.88¢/kWh on November 1, 2026 (pending budget approval) — a pending improvement worth watching. CPS Energy nets your bill monthly and credits year-end surplus at about 1.65–2.02¢/kWh depending on the season.
The takeaway: where export value is low, sizing your system for self-consumption — and pairing it with a battery — matters more than maximizing panel count.
Where Texas Rates Are Headed
Up. Delivery charges from Oncor and CenterPoint rose on June 1, 2026, after regulators approved Oncor's roughly $560 million base-rate case — Oncor's delivery charge hit a record, adding about $4.85/month at 1,000 kWh. Average Texas bills run about $180/month.
That matters for solar math: the kilowatt-hours you offset with your own system are the expensive ones, and delivery charges are the fastest-growing part of the bill.
Incentives on the Table in 2026
The federal picture changed at the end of 2025, and any honest 2026 market brief has to start here: the 30% residential clean-energy credit (Section 25D) expired for homeowner-owned systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. The direct federal credit for a purchased residential system in 2026 is 0% unless Congress enacts new legislation. Third-party-owned systems — leases and power-purchase agreements — may still qualify under Section 48E through 2027, but the installer or lessor must pass that value through to you, so read any lease or PPA contract carefully.
This is general information, not tax advice. Talk with a tax professional about your situation.
At the state level: Texas offers a 100% property-tax exemption on the value solar adds to your home (Tax Code §11.27) — statewide, no application games. There is no statewide tax credit or rebate. Austin Energy offers a $2,500 rebate, but it requires a participating contractor and pre-install steps — skip them and the rebate is forfeited.
Why Now, Honestly
- Delivery charges are at record highs and still rising. Every self-generated kilowatt-hour dodges the most expensive — and fastest-growing — part of your bill.
- Grid stress is a live selling point, not a slogan. ERCOT heat-driven demand keeps setting records, and Texans remember 2021. Batteries add outage resilience on top of bill savings.
- A pending improvement in Austin. Austin Energy's proposed Value of Solar reset to 12.88¢/kWh (November 2026) would raise export compensation for Austin homeowners — a genuine, dated reason to be paying attention now.
No manufactured urgency here: the federal credit cliff already happened, so the case for Texas solar in 2026 rests on rates, grid reality, and your retailer's buyback terms — all of which we model in your quote.
How We Design for Texas
We compare your retailer's current buyback terms — not last year's — size around your summer cooling peaks, and model battery backup for outage resilience alongside bill savings. In Austin Energy and CPS territories, we design to their specific tariffs from the start.
Our Texas Service Areas
Bright Solar is based in Houston, Texas — reach us at (888) 996-1308 — and we serve homeowners and businesses in 28 communities across 7 regions: Dallas County, Tarrant County, Collin County, Greater Houston, Greater San Antonio, Greater Austin, and East Texas. These are areas we serve — our office is in Houston, and we do not claim offices in any of these cities.