ARE Solar

10/20/2026

Your electric bill is not one number. It is about a dozen.

Xcel publishes its own ten-year rate history for the residential schedule, and that table breaks a bill into thirteen named line items. Service & Facilities Charge. Base Rate Energy Charge. Then a stack of riders and adjustments underneath.

One of those thirteen is fixed. You pay it whether the house is full or empty all month.

Here is what happened to the two biggest ones between January 2014 and January 2024.

The fixed Service & Facilities Charge went from $6.75 to $6.29. Down 6.8%. By Xcel's May 2024 brochure it was back up to $7.10, above where it started, which is worth knowing before anyone makes too much of the dip.

The Base Rate Energy Charge went from 4.604 cents per kilowatt-hour to 7.136. Up 55%.

Same bill, same ten years, two directions. More of what you pay now moves with how much power you actually use.

Which is also the honest limit on what a solar array does. Generation offsets the per-kilowatt-hour side of the bill. It does not touch the fixed monthly charge, and where a production meter is required that adds $2.55 a month. You will still get a bill. It will be smaller.

Three things worth finding on your own bill: the Service & Facility Charge, the riders sitting under the energy charge, and your rate schedule. Add them up and you have your real rate.

Sources in the first comment.

10/15/2026

Colorado regulators say Xcel outages are running above historic averages this year.

The detail worth noticing: it isn't the big storms. It's more frequent outages, most of them short.

From 2015 to 2023, customers averaged 95 minutes without power per year. The first half of 2026 already hit 89.

Short, frequent outages are what a home battery handles best. The grid drops. The inverter switches over in under a second. The fridge, the furnace fan, and the router keep running. Some clocks blink. Most things don't.

To be real, it's never whole-home backup. It's the loads you pick, sized to the list you write down.

Free walkthrough if you want to build that list with us.

Source: Colorado PUC analysis, reported by The Colorado Sun, Sept. 29, 2026.

10/13/2026

A price and a bill are not the same thing, and the difference is the part nobody shows you.

Xcel's residential price rose 66% between 2005 and 2024. We covered that in our first post.

Here is the other half. Over those same nineteen years, the average Xcel household's use fell from 7,723 kWh a year to 7,199. Down 6.8%.

So the bill did not keep up with the price. It went from about $700 a year to about $1,083. Up 55%, not 66%.

Adjusted for inflation, that bill is 3.7% lower than it was in 2005.

Using less is what held it down. That is the first lever we listed in post one, and it is the one that actually moved.

Then it turned. The real bill bottomed near $1,003 in 2019 and is up 8% in real terms since. Average use bottomed at 7,026 kWh in 2023 and went back up in 2024.

One caveat that matters. This is every Xcel home divided by the customer count. Your house is not the average house. A bigger home, an EV, a hot summer all move it. Your own twelve months is the only number that counts.

Sources in the first comment.

09/29/2026

We have spent two posts on what electricity actually cost. Here is what the forecast says comes next.

The federal Annual Energy Outlook runs to 2050. Published this April. Eleven different cases, not one answer. EIA's own words: these are "not predictions of what will happen."

What it projects for U.S. residential power, after inflation: up 4.6% over twenty-five years. That is 0.18% a year.

Xcel's actual rate over the last nineteen years, after inflation, was 0.17% a year.

A model looking forward and a stack of filings looking back landed on the same number. That is worth knowing.

Now the part that keeps it honest. In April, EIA projected 17.17 cents for 2026. In August, a different EIA forecast said 18.27 cents for the same year. Six percent apart, on next year.

EIA graded its own past projections in February. Electricity prices came in close. The reason is that gas was cheaper than expected, wind and solar were cheaper than expected, and capital costs were higher. The errors cancelled.

Right answer, two big misses underneath. That is what a twenty-five year energy forecast is.

No forecast goes into an ARE bid. Our proposals use 2.7% a year, and that came from nineteen years of utility filings, not from a model.

Sources in the first comment.

09/22/2026

Every 25-year solar savings number rests on a guess about future electricity prices.

That guess is a setting in the software. On most proposals it lives in the footnotes.

We pulled Xcel's actual residential price from EIA Form 861. Between 2005 and 2024 it compounded at 2.70% a year. Inflation over the same years was 2.53%.

Here is what the assumption is worth. Take one real Denver system: 7.9 kW, $24,611 cash, no battery. Change nothing but the rate.

2.7% gives $24,459 over 25 years. 4% gives $33,682. 6% gives $52,184. 8% gives $77,718.

Same roof. Same panels. Same bill.

Run the assumption forward and it gets easier to check. At 6% a year, Xcel residential power costs 65 cents a kilowatt-hour in 2051. At 8%, it costs a dollar three.

Ours was set at 4%. We moved it to 2.7%. Every ARE savings number got smaller.

Three questions worth asking about any bid, ours included. What rate increase is it built on. How much of your bill does the system actually replace. What does the financing cost in total, not per month.

Sources in the first comment.

09/15/2026

We pulled 20 years of Colorado electricity price data from EIA Form 861.

Then we adjusted them for inflation. The raw numbers are misleading without it.

Xcel's residential price rose from 9.07¢ to 15.05¢ per kWh between 2005 and 2024. That is up 66%. In 2024 dollars, the same change is 3.3%.

The shape matters more than the size. Real prices drifted down for fifteen years. They bottomed near 13.6¢ in 2007 and again in 2019. They are up 10.5% in real terms since.

We ran the same math on a municipal utility, two co-ops and a second investor-owned utility. As billed, all five rose. In 2024 dollars, most are flat or lower.

That is the honest picture. No projections here, just the filings.

Sources in the first comment.

08/28/2026

08/21/2026

A 30kW system. Dual Sol-Ark inverters. Three Fortress batteries.
Standing seam metal in the Lyons foothills. No utility wire to the property line.

We've done more than eight of these across Colorado. Small cabins on one end. Full off-grid homesteads with wind and generator integration on the other.

The systems run the well pump. The freezer. The lights. The cell
booster. They run the day. They run at night. They ride through a string of cloudy days because they were sized to.

That's not magic. That's design.

Free walkthrough if you have a property the grid isn't going to reach.

08/17/2026

We've designed and installed Colorado solar since 2009. Every system we sell, we finish ourselves.

Now we're up for Best of the Front Range in The Denver Post.

If we've done right by you, we'd be grateful for your vote.

The ballot asks for a category — choose Home & Garden > Solar Energy Company. Vote daily through Friday, Aug 28. Link in bio.

08/14/2026

"Doesn't solar take forever to pay off?"

Let's reframe that, because the framing is the problem.

Solar lowers the cost of owning your home. It's a home improvement that also cuts a bill you'd otherwise pay forever.

Because here's the thing: you can never pay off your utility. They bill you this year, next year, at year fifteen, with no end.

Ten years from now, one path has an asset on the roof. The other just has fifteen more years of bills.

We'll walk you through the actual numbers. No someday math.