$27,000 Solar System With No Federal Tax Credit: Maryland's SREC Market Pays It Back in 9.6 Years vs. 17 in Ohio

Here's a scenario playing out in driveways across the country right now: a homeowner in Columbus, Ohio and a homeowner in Rockville, Maryland get nearly identical quotes for a 9 kW rooftop system — $27,000, same panels, similar roof pitch. One of them will have that system paid off in under a decade. The other is looking at nearly 17 years. Same equipment. Same price tag. Completely different math.

The reason isn't the sun. It's the incentive stack sitting underneath the price — and since the Section 25D residential federal tax credit was repealed in 2025, that stack matters more than it ever has. There's no 30% federal credit anymore to smooth over a weak state program. What's left is whatever your state, your utility rate, and your financing choice give you. Let's run the actual numbers.

Why 25D's Repeal Changes Everything About This Math

Before 2025, a $27,000 cash-purchase system got an automatic $8,100 haircut from the federal 30% credit, dropping net cost to $18,900 regardless of where you lived. That flattened a lot of state-to-state variation. With 25D gone, the full $27,000 (or whatever your installer quotes) is now the starting line everywhere — which means state programs, SREC markets, and utility rate structures are doing 100% of the differentiating work instead of 70%.

This is also the backdrop for a coalition called the Strong Tail Solar Alliance, announced this month, in which finance, hardware, and software providers are banding together to help regional installers cut costs specifically because cash and loan customers no longer have that federal cushion. Their stated goal is keeping system ownership competitive against leases and PPAs — because third-party-owned systems can still route through the commercial 48E credit, which wasn't repealed. That's a real structural gap: if you buy your system outright, you eat the full sticker price. If a leasing company owns it, they may still be pulling a federal credit you no longer qualify for. That's a financing-choice variable most quotes don't spell out, and it's worth asking your installer directly which credit path applies to your deal.

The Worked Example: Maryland vs. Ohio on the Same $27,000 System

Both homeowners are buying the same 9 kW system for $27,000 cash. Based on Elovane's analysis of our nrel_county_solar and nrel_solar_irradiance datasets, here's what each roof actually produces, and what each state's incentive stack does to the payback.

Variable	Maryland	Ohio
Annual production (9 kW system)	11,400 kWh	10,600 kWh
Residential utility rate (EIA data)	$0.178/kWh	$0.142/kWh
Annual utility bill savings	$2,029	$1,505
State cash rebate	$1,000 (Clean Energy Grant)	$0
SREC market	~11.4 SRECs/yr × ~$60 = $684/yr	~10.6 SRECs/yr × ~$4 = $42/yr (oversupplied market)
Net system cost after rebate	$26,000	$27,000
Total annual benefit	$2,713	$1,547
Simple payback	9.6 years	17.5 years

Same panels, same install crew skillset, nearly an 8-year swing in payback. Maryland's SREC market — where your system earns a tradable certificate for every 1,000 kWh it generates, on top of the electricity it offsets — is doing the heavy lifting. Ohio's SREC program exists on paper, but years of oversupply have crushed compliance prices to nearly nothing, so it contributes almost no value. This is the same dynamic we found comparing Illinois's SREC program against Indiana's federal-only stack — a healthy SREC market can be worth more than a one-time rebate ever will be.

This is the kind of analysis Elovane runs for you — so you don't have to build the spreadsheet yourself, pulling your actual ZIP code's SREC price and utility rate instead of a regional average.

How Rate Escalation Changes the Answer

Utility rates don't stay flat, and the escalation assumption your installer uses can quietly move your payback by years. Running both states at 0%, 2%, 4%, and 6% annual rate escalation (compounding on top of that $0.178 and $0.142 starting rate):

Escalation rate	Maryland payback	Ohio payback
0% (flat)	9.6 years	17.5 years
2%	8.9 years	15.1 years
4%	8.3 years	13.5 years
6%	7.8 years	12.3 years

Notice the gap shrinks as escalation rises, but it never closes. Even in a high-inflation utility environment, Ohio's homeowner is still waiting roughly 4.5 years longer than Maryland's for the same equipment to pay for itself. If your installer quoted you a single "payback year" number without telling you what escalation assumption they used, ask — a 0% vs. 6% assumption alone is worth over a year of difference on this exact system. You can model this for your specific utility's actual rate history at Elovane rather than trusting a sales-deck assumption.

The Financing Wrinkle 25D's Repeal Created

Because the federal credit is gone for buyers, financing choice now changes who captures the remaining incentive value, not just the monthly payment. Under a cash or loan purchase, you own the system, which means you also own the SREC income in Maryland's example above — that $684/year is yours. Under a lease or PPA, the third-party owner typically keeps the SRECs (and may be claiming 48E on their side), while you get a flat or slowly escalating payment with $0 down.

That's the tradeoff worth pricing out before you sign: a $0-down lease feels safer, but in an SREC state you're handing away real annual income you'd otherwise pocket. In a state like Ohio, where the SREC is worth $42 a year, that tradeoff barely matters — you're not giving up much. In Maryland, it's the difference between a 9.6-year payback and never owning the certificate stream at all. We broke down this exact loan-vs-lease-vs-cash gap in more detail in Solar Loan vs. Lease vs. Cash in 2026, and the state you live in should be the first input into that decision, not the last.

Where Battery Storage Fits — And Where It Doesn't Yet

Global residential battery storage additions are projected to hit 46.1 GWh in 2026, according to InfoLink Consulting, with Fox ESS, Sigenergy, and Deye leading shipment volume in the first half of the year. That kind of scale is exactly what's been pulling hardware prices down — the same dynamic behind FlexGen and Lightshift Energy's 80 MW of grid-connected battery deployments across Virginia and New England this year, which is utility-scale evidence that storage costs are becoming predictable enough to bet on at volume.

For a homeowner, the question is whether a roughly $10,500 home battery pencils out on top of the panels. That depends almost entirely on your time-of-use (TOU) rate spread — the gap between what you pay during peak hours and what you pay off-peak. Assuming a 9 kWh usable daily cycle at 90% round-trip efficiency:

TOU peak/off-peak spread	Annual arbitrage value	Battery payback
$0.15/kWh	$443	23.7 years
$0.25/kWh	$739	14.2 years
$0.35/kWh	$1,035	10.1 years
$0.45/kWh	$1,330	7.9 years

Neither Maryland nor Ohio currently offers a residential TOU spread wide enough on standard rate plans to get much below the 15-20 year range without opting into a specific TOU tariff or stacking in a grid-services payment. That's a very different story than states with steep TOU differentials, where the same battery pays back in 5-6 years — we go deep on that comparison in why your TOU rate spread sets battery payback at 5 or 22 years. The takeaway: don't add a battery to your quote just because it's trending — pull your actual utility's TOU rate sheet first.

What the Panel Supply Chain Is Doing to Your Price Tag

Two supply-side stories are worth knowing about even if they feel distant from your driveway. First Solar just withdrew its Section 337 patent complaint against TOPCon manufacturers at the U.S. trade commission, but only after new Section 232 import restrictions took effect — meaning the tariff landscape shifting under panel imports is likely a bigger near-term price driver than any single patent fight. If your installer's quote jumped in the last few months, this is probably part of why, based on the cost trends we track in our nrel_atb_system_costs dataset.

On the technology side, researchers just pushed inverted perovskite tandem cell efficiency to 26.32% in the lab (25.67% certified), with an encapsulated device retaining 93% of output after 1,150 hours of continuous operation. That's still years from your roof — current commercial panels sit closer to 21-22% efficiency per NREL's default assumptions — but it's a signal that production-per-square-foot keeps improving, which matters most if your roof is small, oddly shaped, or partially shaded and you're trying to squeeze more kWh out of a limited array.

Run Your Own Numbers Before You Sign

The $27,000 example above is real math, but it's not your math. Your roof's orientation, your utility's actual rate (not the state average), whether your state's SREC market is healthy or glutted, and which financing structure lets you keep or lose that SREC income — those four variables alone can swing payback by a decade on an identical system. Before you sign anything, plug your ZIP code, roof specs, and quoted price into Elovane and see where you actually land, rather than trusting a sales rep's "average" payback slide.

Data behind this post

The figures above are computed from the product's own reference tables, last refreshed 2026-04-15:

• 3,672 rows from eia_electricity_prices
• 51 rows from nrel_solar_irradiance
• 6,287 rows from nrel_county_solar
• 648 rows from nrel_atb_system_costs
• 171 rows from dsire_incentive_programs
• 7 rows from fred_financial_rates
• 14 rows from nrel_solar_defaults

Sources

• First Solar drops TOPCon patent complaint — PV Magazine USA
• Global residential storage market to hit 46.1 GWh in 2026 — PV Magazine USA
• Solar equipment and service providers form coalition to lower costs for regional installers — PV Magazine USA
• FlexGen and Lightshift Energy team up to deliver 80 MW of batteries in Virginia and New England — PV Magazine USA
• Symmetry-breaking molecular strategy pushes inverted perovskite solar cell efficiency to 26.32% — PV Magazine USA