Original research
Rooftop solar and the rural electric cooperative
Household solar adoption by utility ownership type across 1,337 American electric utilities: a cut of the federal data we could not find published anywhere else.
Written by HyreSolar Research team Research and analysis
Audited by HyreSolar Research team Data audit and fact check
The finding
What this page claims, and what it does not
Form EIA-861 records what kind of organisation every American electric utility is (investor-owned, cooperative, municipal, state, federal, political subdivision) on a schedule most people never open, and it records net-metered rooftop solar on a different one. Joining the two asks a question that ought to be routine and appears not to be: does the type of utility you happen to live behind change how likely you are to have solar on your roof?
It does, by a lot. Investor-owned utilities report rooftop solar on 5.50% of their residential accounts. Cooperatives report it on 1.35%. The ratio is 4.07 to one, and it holds across 1,337 filing utilities covering 107,256,136 households.
On the novelty of this. We could not find a published source giving net-metered rooftop solar penetration by utility ownership type, and we looked. That is a statement about our search, not a claim of primacy: the underlying files are public and anyone could run this join. What does circulate is qualitative: a large advocacy literature on cooperatives and clean energy, and one quantitative figure, the cooperatives’ share of community solar programmes, which the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association reports as a majority. Community solar is a subscription to a shared array. It is a different product, a different tariff and a different measurement, and it cannot be substituted for the rooftop figure on either side of this comparison.
On causation. Everything below is an association measured in one data year. We set out five candidate explanations near the end of the page and label all five as untested, because this dataset cannot distinguish between them.
Rooftop solar by utility ownership type, 2024
Every American electric utility that reported residential customers, grouped by the ownership type it declares on the Utility Data schedule, and sorted by household solar penetration.
| Ownership type | Utilities | Households served | Rooftop systems | Penetration | Share of households | Share of solar | Capacity (MW) | Battery attachment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| State | 18 | 1,255,714 | 90,324 | 7.19% | 1.2% | 1.9% | 642.7 | 2.24% |
| Investor Owned | 163 | 70,843,435 | 3,898,686 | 5.50% | 66.1% | 83.5% | 26,806.8 | 6.62% |
| Political Subdivision | 88 | 3,718,219 | 166,919 | 4.49% | 3.5% | 3.6% | 991.9 | 4.50% |
| Municipal | 458 | 13,222,030 | 270,294 | 2.04% | 12.3% | 5.8% | 1,885.9 | 2.60% |
| Cooperative | 602 | 18,189,014 | 244,668 | 1.35% | 17.0% | 5.2% | 2,030.3 | 3.49% |
| Federal | 8 | 27,724 | 90 | 0.32% | 0.0% | 0.0% | 0.7 | 0.00% |
| Comparison set | 1,337 | 107,256,136 | 4,670,981 | 4.35% | 100% | 100% | 32,358.3 | , |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024: the Utility Data schedule joined to Net Metering and to Sales to Ultimate Customers on utility number and state. Shares are of the comparison set, not of the national totals, see the exclusion note below.
Figures labelled HyreSolar analysis are computed by us from the EIA source files named below. EIA publishes the inputs; it does not publish these ratios or rankings.
The gap between who is served and who has solar
The single most useful way to read the table is to put two of its columns next to each other. Cooperatives serve 17.0% of the households in the comparison set and hold 5.2% of the rooftop solar. Investor-owned utilities serve 66.1% and hold 83.5%. Municipal utilities serve 12.3% and hold 5.8%.
In absolute terms the cooperative fleet is 244,668 rooftop systems totalling 2,030.3 MW, spread across 602 distribution cooperatives serving 18,189,014 households. Those 602 organisations are 45.0% of every utility in the comparison, cooperatives are by a wide margin the most numerous kind of electric utility in the United States, and by an equally wide margin the smallest on average.
The chart below draws each ownership type as a line between the two shares. A line that slopes down is a category with less solar than its size would imply; a line that slopes up is a category with more. Only cooperatives and municipals slope down, and cooperatives slope down hardest.
How this comparison was assembled
The finding is unusual enough that the construction matters more than the conclusion. Here is every step, in order, so that it can be checked or contradicted.
- 1 Take the ownership type each utility declares
EIA-861’s Utility Data schedule carries one row per utility per state with an ownership classification. We read utility number, state and ownership type, drop rows without a utility number, and de-duplicate on the utility–state pair. That is the spine of the join.
- 2 Attach the residential net metering counts
From the Net Metering schedule, 2024 data year, States sheet: residential photovoltaic installations, residential photovoltaic capacity, and residential PV-paired battery installations, summed to the utility–state pair. A utility filing in three states appears three times and is joined three times.
- 3 Attach the residential customer counts
From Sales to Ultimate Customers, residential customers by utility and state, restricted to filing Parts A, B and D. Part C is the incumbent utility’s delivery of electricity a competitive supplier already reported in Part B; including it double-counts the same household in a restructured market.
- 4 Remove the three energy-only categories
Community Choice Aggregators, Retail Power Marketers and Behind the Meter entities are dropped before anything is aggregated. The reason is the whole callout below this list, and it is the single most important methodological decision on the page.
- 5 Group, and drop any group with no customers
The remaining rows are grouped by ownership type. Any group reporting no residential customers at all is dropped, because a penetration rate with a zero denominator is not a number. 6 ownership types survive, covering 1,337 utilities.
- 6 Compute rates within the surviving set
Penetration is systems ÷ customers within each type. Shares are of the comparison set, not of the national totals, and are labelled that way everywhere on this page. The set holds 74.9% of US residential accounts and 92.0% of US residential rooftop systems.
Why three categories are excluded, and why including them would be worse
EIA-861 classifies some filers as Community Choice Aggregators, Retail Power Marketers or Behind the Meter entities. These organisations sell electricity. They do not own the meter, they do not own the distribution wires, and they do not administer the net metering tariff: the incumbent distribution utility does all three.
The consequence in the file is precise and predictable. Such a filer reports residential customers on the Sales schedule, because it does sell to households, and reports no net-metered installations on the Net Metering schedule, because net metering is not its programme to run. Divide one by the other and you manufacture a category with a solar penetration of zero. It would be the lowest figure on this page by a distance, it would be entirely an artefact of how the form allocates responsibility between a supplier and a wires company, and every ratio computed against it would be nonsense.
So they are removed before aggregation rather than shown and footnoted. The cost of that decision is stated rather than hidden: the comparison set covers 107,256,136 residential accounts, 74.9% of the national total, leaving 35,888,049 accounts outside it. It covers 4,670,981 rooftop systems, 92.0% of the national total, leaving 406,562 systems outside it. Those excluded households are concentrated in restructured retail markets, so the comparison is thinner in California, Texas and the north-east than it is elsewhere.
Note the asymmetry in those two coverage figures, because it is the exclusion rule working as described: the excluded categories account for a quarter of the accounts and a twelfth of the systems. That is exactly the fingerprint of entities that carry customers on their books while somebody else runs the solar tariff.
Expressed as over- and under-representation
Divide each type’s share of the solar by its share of the customers and parity is one. Above one, the category has more rooftop solar than its size implies; below one, less. Expressed as a difference from parity, cooperatives sit at -69% and investor-owned utilities at +26%.
State-owned utilities are the highest-penetration category in the whole comparison at 7.19% (higher than the investor-owned rate) on 18 utilities and 1,255,714 households. Political subdivisions sit close to parity. Municipals, which are public bodies like the state utilities and the political subdivisions, sit well below it at 2.04%.
That pattern is worth pausing on, because it rules out the tidiest available story. This is not public ownership against private ownership: the public categories occupy the top, the middle and the bottom third of the table. Whatever is producing the cooperative result is more specific than a distinction between profit and non-profit.
The same two quantities, drawn as composition
The two bars below are the same comparison arranged so the widths can be read against each other directly. The first divides American residential electricity accounts by the type of utility that serves them. The second divides American rooftop solar systems the same way. The cooperative band shrinks by roughly two thirds between the first bar and the second; the municipal band shrinks by more than half; the investor-owned band grows.
And the same households’ solar
Cooperatives are 45.0% of the utilities and 17.0% of the households in the first bar. They are 5.2% of the systems in the second.
Two explanations the data itself rules out
Before reaching for a cause it is worth eliminating the two that come to mind first, because both are checkable inside this dataset and both fail.
It is not public against private
State-owned utilities lead the table at 7.19%. Political subdivisions sit at 4.49%. Both are public bodies and both beat or match the investor-owned rate of 5.50%.
Municipals, also public, sit at 2.04%, 2.7 times below the investor-owned rate. Cooperatives, member-owned rather than government-owned, sit lowest of the substantial categories at 1.35%.
Public power occupies the top, the middle and the bottom. The ownership axis that matters is evidently not the profit motive.
It is not that co-op members do not want solar
The average cooperative rooftop system is 8.30 kW: the largest of any ownership type, and 1.21 times the 6.88 kW average on investor-owned lines.
Battery attachment on cooperative systems is 3.49% against 6.62% on investor-owned systems, a gap of 1.9 times rather than the 4.1 times seen on adoption itself.
Where a cooperative member does install, they install a larger system and pair it with storage at a rate closer to the national norm than the adoption gap would suggest. That is not the signature of indifference. It is the signature of a smaller number of households getting through.
How many systems the gap represents
An arithmetic device, not a forecast. It asks what the cooperative fleet would look like at other observed rates, holding the customer count fixed.
| Scenario | Rate applied | Implied co-op systems | Actual | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| At the investor-owned rate | 5.50% | 1,000,396 | 244,668 | 755,728 |
| At the comparison-set average | 4.35% | 792,128 | 244,668 | 547,460 |
| At the municipal rate | 2.04% | 371,056 | 244,668 | 126,388 |
| At the national household rate | 3.55% | 645,710 | 244,668 | 401,042 |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. Each row multiplies the 18,189,014 households on cooperative lines by an observed penetration rate from elsewhere in the same data.
This is not a statement that 755,728 systems would exist under different conditions. Cooperative territory differs from investor-owned territory in income, roof stock, housing type, climate and irradiance, and none of those are held constant here. The row is useful for one thing only: putting the ratio on a scale a reader can hold.
The same finding, cut four other ways
A single ratio between two categories is fragile if it depends on the categorisation. It does not.
| Comparison | Higher side | Lower side | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Investor-owned against cooperative | 5.50% (70,843,435 households) | 1.35% (18,189,014 households) | 4.07× |
| Investor-owned against everything else combined | 5.50% | 2.12% (36,412,701 households) | 2.59× |
| All public power against cooperative | 2.90% (18,223,687 households) | 1.35% | 2.14× |
| Comparison-set average against cooperative | 4.35% | 1.35% | 3.23× |
| Battery attachment, investor-owned against cooperative | 6.62% | 3.49% | 1.90× |
HyreSolar analysis of EIA-861 2024. “All public power” is state, municipal, political subdivision and federal utilities pooled, 18,223,687 households and 527,627 systems.
The cooperative rate is the lowest in every cut. It is lower than public power, lower than the set average, and lower than every individual category except the federal one, which is 8 utilities and 27,724 households and should not be treated as a category at all.
Five explanations this data cannot choose between
Each of these is plausible, each is argued somewhere in the literature, and none of them is tested by anything on this page. They are listed so that the reader has the candidates in front of them, not because we are endorsing one.
Hypothesis 1, rate structure
Cooperatives typically recover a larger share of revenue through fixed monthly charges than investor-owned utilities do, because their cost per customer is higher: fewer members per mile of line, and the wires still have to be paid for. A high fixed charge and a low volumetric rate shrink the bill a solar system can offset, and lengthen payback without anyone having to oppose solar.
Why this dataset cannot test it. EIA-861 gives revenue and sales by utility, from which an average price can be computed, but it does not decompose a residential bill into fixed and volumetric components. The mechanism is entirely about that decomposition.
Hypothesis 2, tax appetite
Cooperatives are not-for-profit and historically had little or no federal tax liability, which meant they could not use the investment tax credit directly in the way an investor-owned utility or a taxable third-party owner could. That closed off the utility-owned and third-party-owned models that carried a great deal of investor-owned solar.
This changed on paper. Section 6417 of the Internal Revenue Code, added by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, lets applicable entities including rural electric cooperatives take an elective payment (direct pay) in place of a credit they cannot use, for tax years beginning after 31 December 2022 (see the IRS guidance in the sources below). A 2024 snapshot sits at the very beginning of that regime and would not be expected to show its effect. Nothing here measures whether it has one.
Hypothesis 3, generation commitments
Most distribution cooperatives buy their power under long, all-requirements wholesale contracts from a generation and transmission cooperative. Where such a contract caps the share of load a member may self-generate, or prices the co-op’s obligation on a fixed take, distributed generation on the member’s roof is a cost to the distribution co-op rather than an avoided purchase.
Why this dataset cannot test it. EIA-861 does not record wholesale contract terms, self-generation caps, or the identity of a distribution co-op’s power supplier.
Hypothesis 4: the housing stock itself
Cooperative territory is rural by design; the Rural Electrification Act built these organisations precisely where investor-owned utilities would not go. Rural housing differs from suburban housing in ways that matter to a solar installation: a higher share of manufactured homes, older roof structures, more shading from mature tree cover on large lots, and a smaller and thinner installer market with longer drive times.
Why this dataset cannot test it. There is nothing about buildings in EIA-861. It counts meters, megawatthours and installations. Testing this needs housing data joined at a geography finer than the state.
Hypothesis 5, interconnection administration
A cooperative with 30,214 residential accounts on average, against 434,622 at the average investor-owned utility, is a much smaller organisation. Interconnection review, metering configuration, tariff design and inspection are fixed costs that a small utility carries against a small base. Slower or more uncertain interconnection suppresses installer activity long before it suppresses demand.
Why this dataset cannot test it. Interconnection timelines, queue sizes and application volumes are not in EIA-861 and are not collected consistently anywhere at national scale.
Note also that scale alone cannot be the whole story: municipal utilities average 28,869 accounts, close to the cooperative figure, and still reach 2.04% against the cooperative 1.35%.
Why the framing matters more than the number
Rooftop solar is usually discussed as a consumer decision. A household weighs a quote, a payback period and a tolerance for roof work, and decides. On that framing, low adoption in a place is a fact about the people who live there.
The ownership cut makes that framing hard to sustain. 18,189,014 American households (about one residential electricity account in six) sit behind an organisation whose members adopt at 1.35%, against 5.50% for the households behind investor-owned utilities. Nobody chooses their electric utility. It is determined by an address, and for cooperative territory it was largely determined in the 1930s and 1940s by which areas the investor-owned companies declined to serve.
That does not make the gap unjust, and it does not make anyone a villain. Cooperatives are member-owned, are often the reason electricity reached a place at all, and lead the country in community solar programmes precisely because a shared array fits a rural service territory better than a scattering of rooftops does. What the number does is relocate the question. Adoption differences of this size between categories of utility are structural, and a structural difference is answered by tariff design, interconnection practice and financing access rather than by consumer education.
The 755,728-system figure in the table above is the crude version of the same point. Whatever share of it is explained by roofs, incomes and climate rather than by institutions, the residual is large and it is not distributed randomly across the country.
What each ownership type actually is
EIA’s classifications are legal and organisational rather than descriptive, and two of them are routinely confused.
- Cooperative
- A member-owned, not-for-profit utility, most of them created under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to serve areas investor-owned companies would not. 602 of them file, serving 18,189,014 residential accounts: the most numerous type of utility in the country at 45.0% of filers.
- Investor Owned
- A privately owned utility with shareholders, regulated by a state commission. Only 163 of them file, 12.2% of utilities, yet they serve 70,843,435 residential accounts, an average of 434,622 each.
- Municipal
- A utility owned and run by a city or town as a department of the municipality. 458 file, serving 13,222,030 accounts at 28,869 each on average, comparable in size to a cooperative and quite different in result.
- Political Subdivision
- A public utility district, irrigation district or similar special-purpose government body constituted separately from a city. 88 file, serving 3,718,219 accounts at 4.49% penetration.
- State
- A utility owned by a state government or a state authority. Only 18 file, but they serve 1,255,714 accounts and record the highest penetration in the comparison at 7.19%.
- Federal
- A federal power entity reporting retail residential customers, 8 filers and 27,724 accounts in total. Included for completeness and too small to interpret.
- The three excluded types
- Behind the Meter, Community Choice Aggregator, Retail Power Marketer. Energy sellers that do not meter the customer or administer the net metering tariff, and therefore report customers with structurally zero net metering. See the exclusion callout above.
Methodology and limitations
Source
US Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, data year 2024, final release, downloaded as the published ZIP archives on 2 September 2026. Filing is a legal requirement for US electric utilities, so this is a census of utilities rather than a sample of them.
Three schedules are used: Utility Data for the ownership classification, Net Metering for residential photovoltaic installations, capacity and PV-paired batteries, and Sales to Ultimate Customers for residential customer counts. All three are joined on the utility number and state pair, which is the only key present in all of them.
Definitions
Household: one residential electricity account. Not a Census household: a master-metered building is a single account covering many homes, so penetration is overstated wherever that stock is concentrated. It is concentrated in cities, which are disproportionately investor-owned and municipal territory, so this bias runs against the finding rather than for it.
Rooftop system: one residential net-metered photovoltaic installation as reported by the utility behind whose meter it sits. Leased and owned systems each count once. Solar reported outside net metering is on a different schedule with no installation count and is absent here.
Penetration, residential net-metered PV installations ÷ residential electricity customers, within an ownership type, same year, same filers.
Share of solar, share of households, computed across the comparison set of 107,256,136 accounts, never across the national totals. Every such figure on this page is labelled.
Battery attachment, PV-paired residential batteries ÷ residential PV installations within the type. Standalone home batteries are filed separately and excluded.
The restructured-market trap
EIA splits service in restructured markets across filing Parts: Part B is a competitive supplier’s energy sale, Part C the incumbent utility’s delivery of that same electricity to that same household. The two carry identical megawatthours. Summing customers across every Part double-counts households in exactly the states with the most competitive supply.
Customer counts here are therefore summed across Parts A, B and D only. The same handling elsewhere in this dataset reproduces EIA’s own published residential price series across 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh, which is the evidence the extraction is right.
Limitations
Association, not cause. One data year, one join, no controls. Cooperative territory differs from investor-owned territory in income, housing type, roof stock, irradiance and installer density, none of which are held constant. Every one of the five hypotheses above could be partly true and this data would look identical.
Partial coverage. The comparison set holds 74.9% of US residential accounts and 92.0% of US residential rooftop systems. The missing quarter of accounts sits with the excluded energy-only categories and is concentrated in restructured markets.
Net metering only. 2,031 MW of US residential photovoltaic capacity is reported outside net metering on a separate schedule, with no installation count attached and no ownership breakdown available. If that capacity is distributed differently across ownership types (and in Texas, where most of it sits, it plausibly is) the gap measured here is measured on an incomplete fleet.
Geography is not controlled. Cooperatives are not evenly spread. They are heavily represented in the south-east, the plains and the mountain west, which are also states with weaker net metering rules for reasons unconnected to co-ops. Some part of this gap is a state-policy effect wearing an ownership costume, and this cut cannot separate the two. That limitation is the most serious one on this page.
Ownership is self-declared. The classification is what the utility reports on the Utility Data schedule. We have not audited it against any external register.
Capacity bases are mixed. Utilities report photovoltaic capacity on AC and DC bases and EIA does not normalise, which affects the average-system-size comparison between types more than it affects the counts.
Reproducing or contradicting this
The inputs are three public workbooks from a single federal download; the join key, the Part restriction, the exclusion rule and the arithmetic are all stated above. Every figure on this page is generated from those files by script rather than typed into the prose.
If you run the same join and get a different answer, we would like to know where the paths diverge, most likely candidates are the Part handling on the customer counts and the treatment of the three energy-only categories. If we are wrong, the correction goes on this page with a date attached.
Questions
Are rural electric cooperative members less likely to have solar panels?
How many US households are served by an electric cooperative?
Why do co-ops have less rooftop solar?
Do cooperatives block rooftop solar?
Isn’t there already a published figure for co-op solar?
Which utility ownership type has the most rooftop solar?
Why are Community Choice Aggregators and retail marketers left out?
Can I cite these figures?
Written and audited by
HyreSolar Research
Primary-source research, data analysis and fact checking
We are a research desk, not a sales floor. We read the statute, the tariff, the code section, the federal filing or the manufacturer data sheet ourselves, and we publish the figure with the document it came from and the date we retrieved it. Where a number cannot be traced to a primary source, we publish the shorter page and say what we could not verify. That rule has cost us whole sections, and it is the reason the rest can be trusted.
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How this desk works
- Primary sources only. Statutes from the legislature’s own publishing system, federal data from the agency that collects it, code text from the adopted edition, manufacturer claims from the data sheet. We do not cite an article that cites a source; we go and read the source.
- Every figure carries its provenance. A named document and the date we retrieved it, so you can check it and so you know how old it is. Retrieval dates are not decoration: an EIA rate from May is a different fact from an EIA rate from August.
- We publish what we could not verify. Every research page carries a section naming the things we tried to establish and could not, and why. A paywalled standard, a state website that refused the request, a manufacturer that publishes no figure at all.
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Data as of EIA-861 2024 final release. Authorship on this site is organisational: the analysis belongs to the desk rather than to a named individual, and we do not publish credentials we do not hold. Our editorial policy sets out how we source, date and correct what we publish.
Sources & retrieval dates
- US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Net Metering (annual files, 2014–2024) — Utility-level net-metered installations, capacity and PV-paired batteries by state and customer sector. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Sales to Ultimate Customers (annual files, 2014–2024) — Residential revenue, sales and customer counts by utility and state. The basis for price, bill and consumption figures. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- US EIA, Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector — EIA’s published price series, used to validate our derivation. Agreement across all 357 overlapping state-years is within 0.005¢/kWh. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- US EIA, Form EIA-861, Utility Data schedule (2024) — The ownership classification each utility declares, joined to net metering and sales on utility number and state. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- IRS, Publication 5817-A, Rural electric cooperatives: what is elective pay? — Direct pay of clean energy credits under Internal Revenue Code section 6417, for tax years beginning after 31 December 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- IRS, Elective pay and transferability — The list of applicable entities eligible for elective payment, which includes rural electric cooperatives. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
- NRECA / America’s Electric Cooperatives, community solar — The cooperative share of utility-sponsored community solar programmes, cited on this page as the existing published figure that measures a different thing. Retrieved 2 September 2026.
Is your utility a cooperative?
Ownership type changes the tariff, the interconnection process and the arithmetic. The calculator works from your own rate rather than a national average.
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