Colorado Springs Is Giving Solar Customers Two Rate Options. Both Cost About $38 More a Month.

Update, September 26, 2026: Council approved the changes on September 22. Utilities has relabeled its page from “Proposed changes” to “Approved changes for solar customers,” and the five-year grandfathering and 200% size cap are now settled. April 1, 2027 is a real deadline. One detail the approved version makes plain: under Option 2, the demand charge, monthly rollover of kilowatt-hour credits can be kept for existing customers. Option 1 has none. Since the bill impact is the same either way, that rollover is now the whole choice.

If you have panels in Colorado Springs, or you are collecting quotes right now, the date that decides your money is April 1, 2027. Sign a net metering agreement before it and you keep today’s rates until 2032. Sign after it and you start on the new ones.

City Council approved the proposal on September 22.

Colorado Springs Utilities is offering solar customers a choice between two rate structures. Option one bolts a fixed grid access charge of $1.00 a day onto time-of-day pricing, with on-peak hours from 5 to 9 p.m. on weekdays and no monthly rollover of your kilowatt-hour credits. Option two bills a demand charge instead, set by your single highest 15-minute stretch of on-peak use in the month, at 36.08 cents per kilowatt per day in summer.

Then read what the utility’s own page says those two choices cost. “Both options have the same estimated bill impact: an increase of ~$38/month.”

That is a choice of mechanism, not a choice of price.

The case for the change is real, and worth stating plainly. A solar customer still leans on the grid at 6 p.m. when the panels are done, and the wires, poles and generation serving that hour cost money whether your meter ran backward at noon or not. Utilities’ cost-of-service analysis puts the median at roughly $400 a year per net metering customer. Its consultant, the Brattle Group, sized the 2025 total at $4.3 million across the city’s 11,000 or so solar households.

Now read the next sentence in that same report. “On average, non-solar customers pay $21 per year more due to this cost shift.”

Twenty-one dollars a year. That is the burden being lifted. The relief costs the solar customer about $456 a year.

Both numbers come from the utility’s own filing. A cost shift spread across everybody is small per household. Collected back from one household, it is a car payment’s worth of solar savings. Whether that trade is fair was a rate design judgment, and Council made it on the 22nd. It went the utility’s way.

Your calendar is not a judgment call.

If your net metering agreement is dated before April 1, 2027, you stay on your current rate until April 1, 2032, then pick one of the two options like everyone else. Carrying a 20-year payback in your head? Redo it with a step change in year six. And if you are shopping quotes, the contract date is the deadline, not the install date. Get that date in writing.

One piece of this actually helps you, and it survived the vote. The eligible system size cap goes from 120% of your usage to 200%. If you sized small to fit the old rule and you are adding an EV or a heat pump, that ceiling moves.

Public pressure did work here once. After an earlier round of comment, Council voted 5 to 4 to order Utilities to strip net metering changes out of that rate case entirely. It did not work the second time. The changes are approved, and the remaining lever is your contract date.

One line for everybody else. Utilities answers the question most homeowners never think to ask: rate structures are not guaranteed under a net metering agreement. The agreement covers how you connect, not what you get paid. So before you sign a 25-year solar loan anywhere, find your utility’s grandfathering clause and its expiration date, then run the payback in our solar calculator on the credit rate you will have after that date, not the one you get on day one. Everything in our solar hub assumes you know which number you are betting on.

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