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Solar panels in Denver, CO

Every figure below is produced by simulating a full year — 8,760 hours — of sun angles, cloud cover, air temperature and wind for Denver, then running the result through a panel and inverter model. No rules of thumb.

1,513kWh per kW / year
10,592kWh from a 7 kW roof
0.806performance ratio

What a system actually produces here

Solar output in Denver 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.

MonthSun (kWh/m²/day)kWh per kW7 kW system
Jan2.6104730
Feb3.4108755
Mar4.5135946
Apr5.4140981
May6.01461,025
Jun6.71491,041
Jul6.61501,050
Aug5.9142993
Sep5.0129902
Oct3.8119831
Nov2.796669
Dec2.396669

Electricity rates that shape the payback

What a solar system saves in Denver depends less on how much it produces than on when it produces, and what your utility pays for the surplus. These are the CO schedules modelled by the calculator:

Xcel Energy Colorado — Residential TOU (default)

TOU is the default residential rate in Colorado. Full retail net metering, still. Fixed charge $8.50/month. Summer On-peak $0.24, Shoulder $0.14, Off-peak $0.10. Winter On-peak $0.20, Shoulder $0.13, Off-peak $0.10.
Source: Xcel CO residential TOU, Sheet 33B, Proceeding 24AL-0377E

Export rule: Xcel Energy Colorado — full net metering — every exported kilowatt-hour is credited at the same retail price you pay to import one. Under net billing, exported kilowatt-hours earn far less than the retail price you pay to import them — which is why self-consumption and batteries change the maths so much. The calculator settles every hour individually rather than netting annually.

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.

Open the payback calculator →

See also: solar incentives in Colorado — the state credit, the export rules, and what the §25D expiry changed for buyers here.

Other cities

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.