The price of solar is easy to see. The cost of waiting is easier to miss.
While you wait, you keep buying electricity from your utility. And over the past five years, the average residential cost of electricity has increased at the utilities serving three real A&R Solar homeowners we looked at.
These three homeowners are examples, not a full market sample. But because each is served by a different utility, they give us a useful look at what waiting can mean under different electricity rates.
So if your objection is “solar is too expensive,” it’s worth asking a second question:
What could it cost me to keep waiting?
What does waiting to go solar actually cost?
There’s an old line that the best time to go solar was yesterday.
You can’t go back and put solar on your roof five years ago. But we can look at three homeowners who made that decision then and put what happened next into dollars.
One is in Vancouver and served by Clark Public Utilities. One is in Woodinville and served by Puget Sound Energy. The third is in Portland and served by Pacific Power.
Here’s what their systems have done so far — and what their original proposals projected over 15 years.
*Approximate retail value is not verified customer utility-bill savings. See Sources & Methodology below for calculation details.
Five years in, those three systems have produced electricity with an approximate retail value of $21,500.
But that’s the point: waiting has numbers attached to it too.
How much have electricity costs changed during those five years?
The answer depends on your utility — which is exactly why we looked at homeowners in three different utility territories.
For comparison, we looked at each utility’s average residential revenue per kilowatt-hour. In plain English, it’s a utility-wide measure of the average residential cost per kWh.
Average residential revenue per kWh. These are utility-wide averages, not individual customer rates.
See Sources & Methodology below for calculation details and the Pacific Power data note.
That does not mean every homeowner’s electric bill increased by those exact percentages. Electricity use, individual rate schedules and other charges all affect a bill.
But all three examples ended the five-year period with a higher average residential cost per kWh than where they started.
And that matters when you’re weighing the price of solar against the alternative.
Want to see what solar could look like for your home and your budget? Review our current solar incentives and ways to pay.
What happens if electricity prices keep going up?
Nobody knows exactly what your electric bill will look like five or ten years from now.
We do know utilities continue to file for rate increases.
Puget Sound Energy, for example, is currently asking Washington regulators to approve residential electric rate increases of 16.75% in 2027, 3.76% in 2028 and 8.81% in 2029.
If approved as proposed, those increases would compound to roughly 32% over three years.
They are proposed increases, not guaranteed ones. The rate case is still pending as of October 2026.
You can read more in our breakdown of PSE’s proposed electric rate increases.
The point isn’t to predict the future.
It’s to remember that when you evaluate solar, you aren’t comparing its price against zero.
You’re comparing:
What will it cost me to produce some of my own electricity?
with
What will I spend if I continue buying all of my electricity from the utility?
But what if solar gets cheaper if I wait?
Maybe.
Solar pricing and payment options can change.
But if the plan is to wait because electricity itself might get cheaper, there’s another question worth asking:
When was the last time your utility told you to expect lower electricity costs?
For the three utilities in these examples, the average residential cost per kWh ended 2025 higher than it was in 2021.
Meanwhile, the three homeowners who went solar about five years ago have already generated electricity with an estimated retail value of about $21,500 combined.
They didn’t have to guess the perfect year to go solar.
They just started reducing how much electricity they needed to buy from the utility.
Can a prepaid solar lease make solar more affordable?
The cash price isn’t the only way to think about the cost of solar.
How you pay matters too.
A&R Solar currently offers a prepaid solar lease option in Washington, giving homeowners another way to compare the economics of going solar.
Oregon homeowners will soon have that option too: A&R expects a prepaid solar lease to become available in Oregon within the next month.
If you looked at solar before and the cost stopped you, it may be worth running the numbers again.
Rather than repeating program terms here that may change, we keep our current solar incentives, financing and ways to pay updated in one place.
Is a prepaid solar lease right for everyone?
Not necessarily.
Neither is cash. Neither is financing.
The point is to compare them.
A useful solar proposal should help you understand:
What does the system cost?
What are my ways to pay for it?
What is it expected to save me?
And what could it cost me if I keep buying all of my electricity from the utility instead?
That’s a much more useful conversation than simply asking whether solar is “cheap” or “expensive.”
So, is solar too expensive?
Sometimes the numbers work. Sometimes they don’t.
What matters is whether they work for your home, your electricity use and your budget.
These three A&R homeowners are just examples. They live in different places, use different amounts of electricity and are served by three different utilities.
But five years after going solar, their systems have produced electricity with an approximate retail value of $21,500 combined.
And while those systems were operating, the average residential cost of electricity at each of their utilities ended the period higher than it started.
Those homeowners couldn’t know exactly what utility prices would do.
Their systems just kept producing — and reducing the amount of electricity they needed to buy.
The price of solar matters. So does the price of waiting.
Sources & methodology
The three homeowner examples are real A&R Solar projects in Vancouver, Woodinville and Portland. Actual system production used in the calculations was verified through monitoring: 52.4 MWh in Vancouver, 67.6 MWh in Woodinville and 55.5 MWh in Portland. The projected savings figures come from the homeowners’ original A&R Solar proposals.
The approximate retail value of electricity produced is calculated by multiplying each system’s actual production by its utility’s average residential cost per kWh over the five-year period. This is a way to put the electricity generated into familiar dollar terms. It is not verified customer utility-bill savings; actual savings depend on electricity use, rate schedules, net-metering credits and other utility charges.
Clark Public Utilities: 2021–2025 average residential revenue per kWh is reported directly in Clark Public Utilities’ audited financial statements.
Clark Public Utilities 2025 Audited Financial Statements
Puget Sound Energy: PSE reports its 2021 and 2022 average residential revenue per kWh directly. The 2023–2025 figures are calculated from residential revenue divided by residential electricity sales reported in Washington UTC filings.
PSE 2022 10-K
PSE’s 2023–2025 values are calculated from the utility’s reported residential revenue and residential electricity sales rather than published as standalone cents-per-kWh figures.
Pacific Power — Oregon: 2021–2024 figures come from the Oregon Public Utility Commission. The 2025 figure comes from final EIA-861 sales and revenue data.
Oregon PUC Utility Statistics
U.S. Energy Information Administration
†The Oregon PUC and EIA use slightly different reporting measures. For comparison, EIA reports Pacific Power’s 2024 Oregon residential average at 14.02¢/kWh, while the Oregon PUC reports 14.74¢/kWh. The Pacific Power figures should therefore be viewed as a directional five-year comparison rather than a perfectly uniform data series.
EIA Table 6
