Is a Solar Buyback Plan Actually a Good Deal in Texas?

Last updated: August 15, 2026

Is a Solar Buyback Plan Actually a Good Deal in Texas?

You put panels on your roof, and now your provider wants to sell you on a “solar buyback” plan — get paid for every kWh you send back to the grid. The pitch usually comes with a headline rate that sounds close to what you pay for power in the first place. It rarely works out that clean.

Texas doesn’t have net metering in the way a lot of other states do. What you actually get depends heavily on where you live and which plan you pick — and the fine print does a lot of the work.

There’s no statewide net metering — and that’s the whole story

About 90% of Texas’s electric load runs through ERCOT, the grid that also happens to be where the deregulated, choose-your-own-REP market lives. In that part of the state, there’s no mandatory net metering law. Instead, each Retail Electric Provider (REP) decides whether to offer a “solar buyback” plan at all, and sets its own buyback rate and terms. Some REPs offer none.

Austin Energy and El Paso Electric are worth calling out separately, though for different reasons. Austin Energy actually sits on the ERCOT grid — it’s just a municipal utility exempt from retail competition, so you can’t shop REPs there at all. Its solar credit structure, called Value of Solar, is set by the utility itself rather than by a competing REP. El Paso Electric is the one genuinely outside ERCOT — it’s on a separate grid interconnection entirely, regulated on its own terms with its own net metering rules. If you’re served by either utility, the REP-shopping advice below doesn’t apply to you; you’re dealing with a single utility program instead.

For everyone else in ERCOT, the buyback rate is a separate number from your consumption rate, and it’s usually lower. Reported rates across plans and REPs span a wide range — roughly a few cents per kWh on the low end up to something closer to the retail rate on plans designed to match it, with a smaller number of real-time wholesale plans where the export rate floats with the grid price and can spike or drop sharply hour to hour. The exact number is plan-specific; there’s no single “the buyback rate” in Texas.

Here’s the part that echoes a gotcha we’ve written about before with free-nights-and-weekends plans: solar credits typically only offset the energy charge portion of your bill. TDU delivery charges — the utility’s fee for using the poles and wires, typically a few cents per kWh — still apply on everything you pull from the grid, regardless of how much you exported. Export enough solar to zero out your energy charge for the month, and you can still owe a real dollar amount just in delivery fees. Some plans do fold TDU charges into the credit; most don’t. Check before you assume.

What actually determines whether it pays off

The number that matters most isn’t the buyback rate by itself — it’s how much of your solar production you actually export versus use yourself. Since exports are credited at a lower rate than what you’d otherwise pay to buy that same power from the grid, every kWh you use directly from your own panels is worth more to you than every kWh you send out and buy back credit for later.

That makes system sizing a bigger factor in Texas than in states with real net metering. A system sized to closely match your household’s typical usage — minimizing how much gets exported — usually comes out ahead of a system deliberately oversized to maximize export credits, because the export side of the math is working against you at the margin.

The other variable is what happens to credits you don’t use in a given month. Some REPs let unused credits roll forward, sometimes with a cap (a few Texas providers cap accumulated rollover credit around $1,000). Others zero out or forfeit anything above your bill each month, and most REPs forfeit any remaining balance if you switch providers or your contract ends. This varies plan to plan — there’s no default you can assume without checking.

A short checklist before you sign

• Compare the buyback rate to your plan’s actual consumption rate, not just the headline number REPs lead with.
• Confirm whether TDU delivery charges are excluded from what your credits can offset — most plans exclude them.
• Check whether unused credits roll over month to month, or get forfeited if you don’t use them.
• If credits do roll over, check for a cap on how much can accumulate.
• If you already have solar installed, compare any plan against your system’s actual production and export history rather than an estimate — your real self-consumption ratio is the number that matters, not a sales projection.

Where WattKicker stands on this today

We’ll say this plainly: WattKicker doesn’t currently calculate solar buyback billing. Doing that right means tracking both what your system generates and exports, not just what you consume, plus running a rolling credit ledger against your specific plan’s terms — a genuinely different problem than the usage-and-threshold tracking WattKicker is built for.

If you upload an EFL for a solar buyback plan, WattKicker will tell you that directly instead of giving you a flat-rate usage estimate that doesn’t reflect how your actual bill gets calculated. As the in-app banner puts it: your bill depends on both what you consume and what your system exports — and that’s not something we’re going to fake an answer to.

If you’re on a standard usage-based or bill-credit plan without solar, WattKicker can still help you track where you stand against your plan’s thresholds.