In this guide
Drive out to most of the parcels we sell and the first thing you notice is what is missing. No poles. No wire sagging between them. No transformer sitting on a pad at the corner of the lot. Just ground, sky, and a long quiet.
That absence is the whole reason anybody asks me about solar. The question is almost never whether solar is good. It is closer to this: I bought ten acres with nothing on it, I would like a light to come on, what now.
Weekend camper who wants a fan running in the trailer, homesteader sizing a well pump, retiree building the last house they plan to live in, fella who mostly wants his beer cold and his neighbors distant? The same arithmetic runs for all of you. It just runs at different sizes.
The comparison is not solar versus the grid
Most solar articles are written for somebody who already has power and wants a smaller bill. That buyer is weighing panels against a utility rate. You are not that buyer.
You are weighing panels against the cost of bringing service to a piece of ground that has never had any. Those are different problems with different numbers, and the second one gets decided mostly by how far you sit from the nearest energized equipment.
So before you price a single panel, find out what the line costs.
What a line costs, by the foot
Rural electric cooperatives publish this, and the rates are public. Here is what five of them charge for single-phase primary line, the kind a house or a cabin needs, as published on their own rate pages.
| Cooperative | State | Single-phase overhead | What comes before the meter runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stearns Electric Association | Minnesota | $5.00 per foot | First 100 feet, plus a $650 contribution to construction |
| Wood County Electric Cooperative | Texas | $6.00 per foot | $0 per foot along public roads |
| Pioneer Electric Cooperative | Kansas | $6.50 per foot | First quarter mile at no charge |
| Central Virginia Electric Cooperative | Virginia | $8.17 per foot | First 1,400 feet for a residence |
| East Central Energy | Minnesota | $9.00 per foot | A $600 contribution to construction |
Two things in that table matter more than the rate itself.
The first is the allowance. Those free footages are written for a house that somebody is going to live in and pay a monthly bill on. A vacant parcel often does not qualify the same way. Stearns spells it out: for a fencer, a well, or an unoccupied shed, you pay the contribution or the actual construction cost, whichever is higher. Central Virginia gives its 1,400 free feet to a residential customer and charges a barn or a garage the full run.
The second is what the route looks like. Overhead is the cheap version. Wood County lists single-phase underground at $9 a foot against $6 overhead, and adds $8 a foot for boring and up to $10 a foot to clear heavy timber. East Central charges an extra $6 per trench foot from November through March. Rock, creeks, timber, and a neighbor who will not grant an easement all turn into money.
Call your cooperative, give them the parcel number, and ask two questions: what is the rate, and where does the nearest energized equipment actually sit. Not the nearest road. The nearest transformer. That single answer decides more than any panel spec sheet you will read this year.
The credit you may have been counting on is gone
If you read an older article about going solar, it almost certainly told you to take 30 percent off the top. That stopped being true this year, and it changes the answer for a lot of people.
What a system costs to put in
The Department of Energy and NREL put average residential system pricing in the first half of 2025 at $3.20 to $4.20 per watt of direct current capacity. Berkeley Lab, which tracks installed prices across the country, found the middle of the residential market running roughly $3.20 to $5.50 per watt in 2023, with prices still easing year over year.
Read those as a floor rather than a quote. They describe grid-tied systems. An off-grid setup carries things a grid-tied one does not: a battery bank, a charge controller, and usually a generator for the stretch in February when the sun does not cooperate. The battery is where an off-grid budget goes to die, and it is also the piece with the shortest warranty on the whole system.
The honest way to size this is backwards from your actual loads. A cabin with LED lights, a small fridge, a water pump, and a laptop charger is a different animal from a house running a well, a septic pump, and a heat source. Write down what you plan to turn on before anybody quotes you a number.
The Southwest pays back faster, and that is measurable
Sunshine is not evenly distributed and it shows up in the production numbers. The Energy Information Administration compared utility-scale photovoltaic capacity factors from 2014 through 2017 and found Arizona at 29.1 percent, Utah at 29.0 percent, and California at 28.4 percent, against a national figure of about 25 percent. The Southeast and the Northeast came in substantially lower.
Those are utility-scale numbers from 2019, not a promise about your roof. What they tell you is directional and it holds: the same array produces more in Apache County, Arizona than it does in northern Minnesota, and the payback period moves with it. If you are choosing between parcels in different states and solar is central to your plan, this belongs in the decision.
Where solar falls down
I am not going to sell you panels, so here is the other side of it.
Batteries are the weak link. Tesla warrants the Powerwall for ten years and 70 percent of its original capacity at the end of that term. Enphase warrants its IQ Battery 5P for fifteen years or 6,000 cycles, whichever comes first, down to 60 percent capacity by year fifteen. Panels outlive the batteries by a wide margin, which means the expensive replacement is baked into the plan whether you budget for it or not.
Panels themselves are the durable part. NREL puts median degradation at about half a percent per year, and most modules carry a 25-year performance warranty. They do not stop working at 25 years. They just stop being guaranteed.
Then there is the weather. Snow load, a cloudy week, a stand of ponderosa on the south side of your build spot, and a winter sun angle that nobody checked in June. Solar is a seasonal system pretending to be a constant one, and the gap is filled by either a bigger battery bank or a generator.
Recycling is still a soft spot too. The infrastructure for taking panels apart at end of life is thin, and it is a fair thing to hold against the technology.
Check these before you size anything
Check these before you size anything
Where the nearest energized equipment actually sits.
Not the nearest road, not the nearest house. The nearest transformer or pole your cooperative will build from.
Your cooperative’s published rate and its free allowance.
Then ask whether a vacant parcel gets that allowance at all, or gets billed at actual cost.
Whether the route runs overhead or has to go underground.
Trenching, boring, and timber clearing are priced separately and they add up faster than the wire.
What your county says about a ground mount.
Some treat an array as a structure with setbacks and a permit. Some do not. Ask before you pour anything.
Shade and slope on the actual build spot, in winter.
A site that looks wide open in June can sit in tree shadow at a December sun angle.
Whether you need power now or power at payoff.
On financed land the permanent array waits. A portable panel and a battery box for weekend use is a different conversation.
What this looks like on land you are still paying off
We hold the deed until your note is paid in full, which means a permanent, pole-mounted, county-permitted array is a payoff project rather than a first-weekend project. That is the same rule that governs a house, a barn, or a septic system, and it is worth knowing before you order anything.
What you get on day one is use. Camping on your own ground within county limits, a portable panel on the roof of the truck, a battery box running lights and a fridge for the weekend. Things in between, a driveway or a fence, are usually a conversation with a Land Specialist rather than a flat no. Payoff is the unlock, and that is when the permanent system goes in.
Start with the distance, not the panels
The mistake I watch people make is shopping for a system before they know what the alternative costs. Call the cooperative, get the rate and the distance, and then price the solar against it. One phone call turns a vague question into a number you can actually decide on.
If you are still picking the ground, pick it with this in mind. Our off-grid parcels and homestead and cabin parcels are mostly out where the poles stopped a long time ago, and the listing for each one says what we know about power, water, and access.
Sun is the one utility out here that never sends a bill. It just asks you to build something worth pointing at it.
