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

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 votes on the proposal 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 is a rate design judgment, and Council makes it on the 22nd. Your call.

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 the filing actually helps you. The same proposal raises the eligible system size cap 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.

Want a say? Council meets September 22 and posts the agenda first. Showing up has worked here before: after the last round of public comment, Council voted 5 to 4 to order Utilities to strip net metering changes out of that rate case entirely.

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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