How Much Is Solar in Detroit, MI? $2.91/W, 21.4-Yr Payback

Why this number

A kilowatt of panels in Detroit produces about 1,247 kWh a year — the only Michigan city with its own modeled figure, so the useful comparison is against the statewide 1,205 kWh per kW band rather than another city. On an 8 kW system that is a payback of about 19.1 years at 23.05¢/kWh.

What sets Detroit apart

DTE Electric territory; tightest five-point spread in the wave (1243-1252).

Your utility, officially

Michigan’s average residential rate is 23.1¢/kWh, but the bill in Detroit comes from DTE Electric at 20.13¢ — 13% below the state figure. These are the residential figures Detroit’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: DTE Electric is modeled here under the state’s net billing rules, and that treatment is baked into every payback figure on this page.

Detroit is DTE Electric territory — investor-owned, 2,067,758 residential customers in the 2024 EIA-861 data, the biggest utility in Michigan and one of the biggest in this dataset. Its bundled residential average is 20.13¢/kWh, and unlike the retail-choice states surrounding it, that number means what it appears to mean for the great majority of DTE households. Twenty cents is expensive electricity, and expensive electricity is the raw material of solar payback: every kilowatt-hour a Detroit roof produces and consumes on site avoids a full-freight retail rate that most of the Midwest would wince at.

The sun is ordinary. PVGIS models Detroit at 1,247 kWh per kW per year, from the tightest five-point cluster spread in this wave (1,243–1,252) — a genuinely uniform solar resource across the metro, better than lake-effect Cleveland’s 1,209, worse than Baltimore’s 1,343. At the full 20.13¢ rate that yield would offset about $251 per kilowatt of panels in year one, which is strong. But that sentence carries a load-bearing “would,” and here is why.

Michigan is not a full-retail net-metering state. Our data classifies it as net billing under the Distributed Generation Program, in effect since May 9, 2019, held at medium confidence — and it carries an unresolved conflict we will not paper over: the MPSC’s consumer brochure describes full retail for systems up to 20 kW, while DTE’s and Consumers’ inflow/outflow tariffs credit exports roughly 7¢ below retail. Those two descriptions produce very different paybacks, and we could not reconcile them from primary sources. Verify against DTE’s own tariff, in writing, before you sign. Until then, the conservative planning assumption is the tariff version: self-consumed kilowatt-hours are worth 20.13¢, exported ones meaningfully less, so a system sized to your daytime load — or paired with load shifting — beats an oversized one.

Michigan offers no state-level solar incentive, no sales-tax exemption in our data, and no property-tax exemption — the case is the bill savings, full stop, set against an installed-cost average of $2.91 per watt, the highest of the states in this wave. DTE’s 2024 filing counts 9,937 residential net-metered customers and 65.609 MW, about 6.6 kW per system and roughly one home in 208 — a thin fleet for a 20-cent utility, which tells you the export uncertainty and the sticker price are doing exactly what you would expect to demand. The rate says yes; make the tariff say it too before you spend money.

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

DTE Electric serves most of Detroit, but the 23 counties in its EIA-861 footprint also include Consumers Energy at 19.1¢, Tri-County Electric Cooperative at 18.0¢, and Great Lakes Energy Cooperative at 19.2¢ — each priced below DTE’s own 20.13¢. The largest gap, about 2.1¢ down to Tri-County, is enough to move a solar payback timeline, and a cooperative’s net-metering terms can differ from DTE’s regardless of price. Michigan’s July 2026 state average, 23.05¢, is a later figure calculated a different way than these 2024 numbers. As with the rest of this territory, it’s the property’s ZIP code, not the city listed in its address, that determines which utility bills it.

The exact answer is a ZIP question, not a city question: look up your utility by ZIP . Candidates: utilities EIA-861 lists in 23 service counties of the metro’s main utility; prices are 2024 revenue ÷ sales from the official file.

An 8 kW system in Detroit, priced out

Only the first two rows differ. Everything financial — rate, tariff, price per watt — is inherited from Michigan 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 Detroit array would produce, with rates rising at 2.5% a year, comes to roughly $70,707.

Solar aside, the EV vs. gas cost calculator runs Detroit’s 23.1¢/kWh rate against what a gas car costs to fill instead.

Run it with your own bill