How Much Is Solar in Denver, CO? $2.66/W, 12.7-Yr Payback

Why this number

A kilowatt of panels in Denver produces about 1,494 kWh a year, the lowest of the 3 Colorado cities modeled here — behind Colorado Springs at 1,516, Grand Junction at 1,516. That is a payback of roughly 11.3 years against 11.2 years in Colorado Springs, with the same electricity rate, the same export rule and the same installed price. The difference is entirely the sky.

What sets Denver apart

High altitude and a dry climate give Denver a figure most northern cities cannot approach.

Your utility, officially

Colorado’s average residential rate is 17.0¢/kWh, but the bill in Denver comes from Public Service Co of Colorado at 15.05¢ — 11% below the state figure. These are the residential figures Denver’s utility reported to the U.S. Energy Information Administration on Form EIA-861 for 2024 — computed as revenue ÷ sales from the official file, not estimated:

How exports are treated matters as much as the headline price: Public Service Co of Colorado is modeled here under the state’s full-retail net metering rules, and that treatment is baked into every payback figure on this page.

Denver homes are billed by Public Service Company of Colorado — the operating company everyone knows as Xcel Energy — an investor-owned utility with 1,365,053 residential customers across the Front Range paying an average of 15.05¢/kWh in the 2024 EIA-861 file. Being investor-owned matters in Colorado’s favor for once: because Xcel is regulated by the state Public Utilities Commission, it is fully bound by C.R.S. 40-2-124, the 2004 statute behind Colorado’s net-metering rule, and that rule still credits residential exports at the full retail rate. Read that again with California in mind. A Denver homeowner’s exported kilowatt-hour offsets a purchased one at par, while new systems in Fresno or San Diego collect a modeled 6.5¢ against retail rates over 30¢. Colorado’s modest 15.05¢ price buys less per kilowatt-hour saved, but the export regime wastes none of it — full-retail crediting makes system sizing forgiving, makes batteries optional rather than structural, and makes a plain south-facing array without any load-shifting gymnastics a perfectly rational purchase.

Xcel’s long-running interconnection and incentive channel for rooftop systems is its Solar*Rewards program; the official residential page is at xcelenergy.com . Treat program incentive levels as perishable — they are budgeted and revised — and take current figures from that page, not from any dated summary.

On rate structure: Xcel has been moving Colorado residential customers onto a time-of-use default with an evening peak, and plan details have shifted over the past few years, so check which schedule your own account is on before modeling savings; the structure you are billed under changes what self-consumed solar is worth hour to hour even though exports net against retail.

Two caveats earn a place here. First, Xcel reported no residential net-metering counts in the 2024 EIA file, so we cannot tell you how many Front Range rooftops are already connected — an odd blank for a utility this size. Second, the full-retail regime is a statute plus PUC practice, not a law of nature; Colorado has debated successor structures, and the states that cut export rates all looked like this the year before they did. The current deal is one of the best in the country. Interconnecting while it holds is the entire strategy.

Source: EIA Form EIA-861, 2024 final release , accessed 2026-09-02. Average price is total residential revenue divided by total residential sales for the year — your own rate depends on your tariff and usage tier.

Who else serves the metro

Metro Denver’s main provider is Public Service Company of Colorado, yet its EIA-861 territory reaches across 56 counties and overlaps with CORE Electric Cooperative at 15.0¢, Black Hills Colorado Electric at 17.0¢, and Southeast Colorado Power Association at 17.2¢. CORE’s rate is nearly identical to Public Service’s 15.05¢, only about a nickel apart, while Southeast Colorado runs about 2.15¢ higher — a gap that matters for payback math mainly because each utility can set its own export terms, not just its own price. Colorado’s July 2026 state average, 17¢, is a later figure calculated differently than these 2024 numbers. It’s the ZIP code on a property, not the city, that determines which utility serves it.

The exact answer is a ZIP question, not a city question: look up your utility by ZIP . Candidates: utilities EIA-861 lists in 56 service counties of the metro’s main utility; prices are 2024 revenue ÷ sales from the official file.

Denver against the rest of Colorado

Across the 3 Colorado cities with their own modeled figures, production spans 1.5% — Denver at 1,494 kWh per kW to Colorado Springs at 1,516. Every column except production is identical down this table: same 17.0¢/kWh retail rate, same export regime, same $2.66/W installed cost. The payback differences are caused by weather and nothing else.

Against the state figure, Denver runs 0.6% above Colorado’s 1,485 kWh per kW — a payback 1.3 years longer than the statewide 11.4-year estimate on the same hardware at the same price.

An 8 kW system in Denver, priced out

Only the first two rows differ. Everything financial — rate, tariff, price per watt — is inherited from Colorado without change, which is the point: a city page that quietly used a different electricity rate from its state page would be guessing, not measuring.

Doing nothing is not free either. Twenty-five years of the electricity an 8 kW Denver array would produce, with rates rising at 2.5% a year, comes to roughly $62,475.

If an EV charges at the Denver house, the EV + TOU + whole-home calculator prices that charging against this same solar output.

Run it with your own bill