Arizona Cut What Your Panels Earn Again Today. Your Rate Is Set the Day You Apply, Not the Day You Sign.

If you’re on Arizona Public Service or Unisource and your panels are already wired to the grid, nothing changed for you today. Your interconnection request locked your export rate the day it was filed, and it stays there. File this away.

Everybody else in those two territories: the number your installer built the payback quote around dropped this morning.

As of September 1, APS and UNS credit you $0.05554 for every kilowatt-hour your roof pushes back onto the grid. It was $0.06171. The Arizona Corporation Commission voted that 10% cut through on August 13.

Seven years, seven cuts, all at the legal maximum

Arizona law caps how fast the export rate can fall at 10% a year.

APS didn’t ask for 10%. It asked for 36.8%, all the way down to $0.04511. The commission said no and handed it the legal maximum instead.

That’s the seventh year running Arizona has taken the biggest cut the statute allows, every year since 2018 except 2022. The rate was $0.129 in 2018. It’s $0.0555 now. Down 56.9% in eight years.

Kate Bowman of Vote Solar, which fought the reduction: “We are disappointed by the ACC’s decision to discourage solar adoption, keeping meaningful relief for customers and communities out of reach.”

Now the part nobody says out loud at the hearing. By Vote Solar’s own numbers, an APS customer pays about 34 cents a kilowatt-hour on a summer evening. A UNS customer pays about 19 cents. You sell at 5.55.

Same wire, same afternoon, roughly six to one.

What it costs on your roof

Take 1,000 kilowatt-hours of exports a year. This year’s cut alone shaves $6.17 off what you collect. Sounds like nothing, and for one year it is.

It isn’t one year. Your credit doesn’t reset annually, it attaches to your interconnection request and sits there.

Stack all eight years of cuts and the picture sharpens. Those same 1,000 exported kilowatt-hours earned $129 in 2018. Today they earn $55.54.

The verdict: panels are still fine math in Arizona. Exporting isn’t. A kilowatt-hour you burn inside your own house is worth whatever APS would have charged you for it, up to about 34 cents on an August evening. The one you ship to the grid is worth a nickel and a half.

Do this before you sign

Have a signed solar contract in APS or UNS territory but no interconnection application filed yet? Call your installer today and ask, in writing, which export rate the application will get.

Then make them rebuild the payback at $0.05554. If the case still holds, sign it. If the whole thing leaned on 6.17 cents, you just learned what that quote was made of.

Tucson Electric Power customers, you’re next in line. The commission is set to take up the same reduction for TEP. An application in before that vote gets the rate that exists today.

Run the numbers yourself instead of taking the sales sheet on faith. Our solar payback calculator lets you set the export credit and see what changes when more of your production stays home. Size the array to what you burn in the evening, not to what fits on the roof. The rest of our solar coverage is in the solar hub and our current picks.

One piece of background worth having. Arizona doesn’t do one-for-one net metering anymore. It sets an export credit through a formula the commission calls the resource comparison proxy, recalculated every year and limited by that 10% cap. So this isn’t a one-time event. Barring a change in the law, there’s another cut queued up for next September.

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