Texas Now Makes Your Utility Prove a Solar Fee Before the State Approves It. El Paso's Landed Six Months Early.

If you own rooftop panels in the part of Texas outside the ERCOT grid, there’s a new law meant to stand between you and a utility quietly rewriting what your exports are worth.

It took effect twelve days ago. Check the calendar before you get comfortable.

What the law says

House Bill 912 amends the Utilities Code, and the operative sentence is short. Before approving an alternative method of compensating a rooftop solar owner, “the commission shall require the electric utility to conduct and submit to the commission a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis using established best practices to justify the rates of compensation and any associated fees.”

The commission then has to consider that analysis before it signs off, including on fees that apply only to solar owners.

Translation: your utility can’t ask the PUC to pay you less for what your roof sends back without showing its work first.

Nobody voted against it. The House passed it 148 to 0, the Senate 31 to 0, and the Governor signed it in May 2025. Then it sat. The effective date written into the bill is September 1, 2026.

Here’s what they don’t tell you

The same section that adds the hurdle also opens a door.

The old text said flatly that a solar owner’s generation offsets their consumption for the billing period. The new text says that happens “unless the commission approves an alternative method,” and the legislature’s own bill analysis describes it the same way. One-for-one offset went from the rule to the default.

So the bill adds a requirement and writes the escape hatch into the statute on the same page. Worth knowing before somebody sells you a 20-year payback built on today’s rate.

El Paso is the case in point

On February 20, 2026, the PUC approved El Paso Electric’s rate case. Six months before HB 912 took effect.

Vote Solar, which fought the case, says the commission “ordered an additional new fee of $4.75 per kilowatt of energy usage for households with rooftop solar” and that it “could add over $20 to bills.” By the same account, the administrative law judges who heard the case had recommended rejecting both the higher fixed charges and the demand charge. The commissioners went the other way.

Note the unit. Per kilowatt, not per kilowatt-hour. A charge priced on capacity is one your panels can’t erase, because it bills how much grid you call on at once, not how much power you buy.

Sam Silerio of Solar United Neighbors wrote in June that the utility swapped a $30.25 flat monthly charge for the variable version, and that El Paso Electric “will compensate a solar customer less than $20 for 1,000 kilowatt-hours” of exported solar “but will charge our neighbors $150 for that same energy.” Both of those sources are advocates, not neutral parties, and we’re telling you so.

Your call, and the move

The law is worth having. It is not retroactive relief, and anyone telling El Paso solar owners it fixes this month’s bill is wrong.

What it changes is the next fight. The analysis is a required filing now, which means it will exist, and you can ask for it.

Shopping solar outside ERCOT? Ask the installer which compensation schedule the payback assumes, and what that payback looks like if the PUC approves an alternative. Get it in writing. A quote built on one-for-one offset is built on something the statute now calls conditional.

Already own panels? Read your bill for a per-kilowatt line, not just the per-kilowatt-hour ones. That’s the charge solar doesn’t touch.

Our solar calculator shows what a capacity charge does to payback, which is the number the brochure leaves out. Solar in Texas has the state picture, and we covered the wider shift to fixed charges here.

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