Solar cooperative helps slash cost of solar in El Paso

A program in El Paso that’s designed to shave down the cost of rooftop solar systems by thousands of dollars is wrapping up for this year, but the national nonprofit behind the initiative – Solar United Neighbors , or SUN – wants to get more households on board next year. 

The solar cooperative run by SUN and local nonprofits Eco El Paso and Amanecer People’s Project started in 2022. It allows homeowners to collectively seek bids from local solar installers who want to secure a batch of customers at once.

For homeowners, buying solar panels in bulk lowers the price, plus the group compares pricing and warranties before selecting a well-vetted local installer, who also answers questions about the solar installation process. 

“We do plan to continue partnering with El Paso,” said America Garcia, the Texas program director for SUN. 

“You do get support throughout the entire process, because you get to ask us any question,” she said. Joining the co-op is free and participants aren’t required to move forward with buying a solar system after the group receives a bid.

When the co-op opened for participants in January, about 30 people signed up and 10 bought a solar panel system, a marked decline from the El Paso co-op’s first year when 120 people signed up. Organizers said elevated inflation and costly interest rates dampened interest in the solar co-op this past year.

The local business Sunshine City Solar won the bid for the solar installations, and recently completed the 10th and final system for this year’s co-op round. Owner Sam Silerio said he was able to offer bulk pricing that lowered the cost of an average, six kilowatt system from nearly $16,000 to about $13,800 through the cooperative. 

Silerio said his team went to each of the 30 participants’ homes, surveyed the home’s roof and electrical service before giving each co-op participant a custom quote. 

“By shopping as a group, we were able to offer them a much more competitive price for their solar installs and make it a better investment,” Silerio said. 

‘There’s substantial savings’

For Amanda Lawson, joining the solar co-op in El Paso last year allowed her to finally purchase a solar system after thinking it was out of her price range.

Prior to joining the co-op, Lawson said she had received around eight quotes from solar installers that ranged from $25,000 to $30,000 for a rooftop system. 

Through the co-op, Lawson said she bought a solar system from Silerio with 25 panels for about $19,000 – $6,000 cheaper than the lowest quote Lawson had previously received.

“For us, it was the difference between being a cost option that we weren’t going to consider, to actually doing it,” Lawson said. “There’s substantial savings with the co-op.” 

Garcia, the SUN program manager who’s based in Houston, said solar co-op participants can also purchase a battery storage system to pair with the rooftop solar panels. 

The solar panels charge up the battery when the sun is out midday, and then a home could partially run off of the battery system at night or during a power outage, depending on the number of batteries installed. 

For Houstonians such as Garcia who recently lost power for a days-long stretch in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, battery backups are especially attractive, she said. 

“It’s important that we move towards more sustainable forms of energy, but also towards resiliency,” she said. “The hurricane was a perfect example of that. I remember sitting in my living room with my three dogs … and I couldn’t help but think how different my life would have been had we had solar panels and a battery.”

Lawson said the price she paid would have increased by between $8,000 and $10,000 per battery added on. It can take a handful of batteries to fully power everything in a home during an outage.

Silerio recently installed Lawson’s solar system, so she said she hasn’t been able to fully evaluate how much lower her electric bill might be.

El Paso’s power infrastructure

In El Paso Electric’s service territory – which spans from Hatch, New Mexico, to Van Horn, Texas – just over 33,000 of the utility’s customers owned rooftop solar systems as of the end of last year, about 7% of EPE’s total customers. From 2021 through 2023, EPE received an average of 4,700 annual applications to interconnect a rooftop solar system to the utility’s power grid. 

Collectively, residential solar panels throughout the Borderland have a capacity to generate 186 megawatts, enough to power something like 40,000 homes. One megawatt is roughly enough to power between 200 and 300 homes on a hot summer day, depending on the temperature. 

EPE charges customers who add rooftop solar systems a minimum bill of $30 per month, even if a home’s solar panels produce more power than the home consumes. Simmons said he’s working to try to get the utility to lower that minimum bill some. 

El Paso Electric leaders see rooftop solar as relatively inefficient and expensive compared with the massive solar farms that EPE is in the process of developing on the outskirts of El Paso. 

EPE is developing four large solar facilities: a utility-owned solar farm in Fabens in far East El Paso County, plus developer-owned solar farms in Santa Teresa and one near Deming, New Mexico, from which EPE will purchase power. 

The Fabens project could cost as much as $257 million to build. That site alone will feature enough solar panels to generate 150 megawatts of power, compared with the 186 megawatts of capacity from all of the tens of thousands of residential rooftop solar systems throughout El Paso and Las Cruces combined. 

And El Paso Electric usually doesn’t need power from a home’s solar panels during the middle of the day, when there’s almost always enough electricity available to power the region. But EPE needs all the electricity it can get later in the day, around 6 p.m., when demand for power peaks but solar panels are generally no longer producing electricity. 

Unless customers with rooftop solar also own a battery storage system – only around 200 EPE customers own battery systems – they still rely on El Paso Electric’s power grid, meaning the power plants, poles, wires and workers needed to provide power to a home when the sun isn’t shining. 

Without the $30 minimum bill on rooftop solar customers, EPE argues, it wouldn’t collect enough revenue from them to maintain the system that keeps their lights on at night after solar falls off. That would leave customers without rooftop solar systems to shoulder the majority of the cost of maintaining the region’s power grid, according to EPE. 

El Paso Electric also has a financial incentive to own its own power sources such as solar farms rather than to encourage customers to get their own solar systems. That’s because EPE’s profits are determined by how much the utility spends on big capital projects that EPE owns, such as a power plant or a utility-scale solar farm. 

Lawson, the co-op participant, said she wanted to add a household solar system to lower her environmental impact and generate pollution-free power for her home. But she also said she expects power bills to continue escalating in El Paso in the coming years, so she wanted to get out ahead of rising utility bills. 

“With the change in ownership of El Paso Electric, I think we are really likely to see a lot of increases” in bills, Lawson said, referring to the acquisition in 2020 of EPE by an investment fund affiliated with JPMorgan Chase. 

“It just seemed like, if it was something I could afford, that it was a no-brainer,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I want to do it?”

Another solar co-op round for 2025 hasn’t been announced. Eco El Paso has helped promote the program to El Pasoans, and Joshua Simmons, the group’s executive director, said he wants to see the co-op return. 

Simmons acknowledged the upfront cost of adding rooftop solar, even at a discounted price, is still too high for many El Pasoans despite long-term savings on electricity bills. Possibly another co-op round could include incentives to make solar panels affordable for low-income households as well. And now that local solar installers have seen how the co-op works, they may have better offers for participants, Simmons said. 

“I wouldn’t want to see that be put to rest,” he said of the solar cooperative. “We’re open to doing another one.”

Garcia with the SUN nonprofit said future rounds of the annual co-op could include options for businesses and other groups beyond homeowners, Garcia said.

“In the future, we will be working with El Paso to help them take nonprofits and small businesses solar as well,” she said. “So we definitely plan on expanding our work in El Paso.”