Home / Solar by city / Austin, TX
Solar panels in Austin, TX
Every figure below is produced by simulating a full year — 8,760 hours — of sun angles, cloud cover, air temperature and wind for Austin, then running the result through a panel and inverter model. No rules of thumb.
What a system actually produces here
Solar output in Austin peaks in July and bottoms out in December, a swing of about 1.6×. That seasonal shape matters more than the annual total if your utility settles exports monthly rather than annually — a big summer surplus can be worth much less than the same energy spread evenly.
| Month | Sun (kWh/m²/day) | kWh per kW | 7 kW system |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 2.8 | 90 | 631 |
| Feb | 3.5 | 93 | 654 |
| Mar | 4.5 | 119 | 835 |
| Apr | 5.2 | 121 | 849 |
| May | 5.6 | 125 | 873 |
| Jun | 6.4 | 131 | 916 |
| Jul | 6.6 | 139 | 972 |
| Aug | 6.1 | 134 | 941 |
| Sep | 5.2 | 121 | 849 |
| Oct | 4.2 | 115 | 802 |
| Nov | 3.1 | 91 | 640 |
| Dec | 2.6 | 85 | 598 |
Electricity rates that shape the payback
What a solar system saves in Austin depends less on how much it produces than on when it produces, and what your utility pays for the surplus. These are the TX schedules modelled by the calculator:
Texas retail provider — Solar buyback plan
No statewide net metering. Each retailer sets its own buyback, and the ones that pay more charge more. Fixed charge $9.95/month.
Summer Flat $0.17.
Winter Flat $0.15.
Source: Composite of TXU Solar Buyback, Gexa Solar Export Saver and comparable ERCOT plans
Run your own numbers
Payback depends on what you pay for the system, how much power your household uses after dark, and which incentives you qualify for — none of which a city page can know. The calculator asks for those and settles all 8,760 hours against your actual rate.
See also: solar incentives in Texas — the state credit, the export rules, and what the §25D expiry changed for buyers here.
Other cities
- Phoenix, AZLos Angeles, CASan Francisco, CASan Diego, CAFresno, CALas Vegas, NVSalt Lake City, UTDenver, COHouston, TX
Method
Irradiance is decomposed into beam and diffuse components and projected onto the array plane with the Perez model, with incidence-angle losses, a cell-temperature model driven by air temperature and wind, and an inverter efficiency curve including clipping. Annual yield is checked against NREL PVWatts v8 across all 18 modelled cities; RMS error is 2.70%. See the glossary for what each term means.