Full retail value, including taxes
The city returns excess power at the full retail value including taxes, which is a stronger position than many Florida solar customers are in and stronger than several neighbouring municipal utilities now offer.
Credits are issued in kilowatt hours rather than dollars and are banked by the meter. That distinction matters: a kWh credit holds its value if rates rise, where a dollar credit would not.
Net metering itself carries no charge, and it is available to any City of Tallahassee Electric customer. You do need to sign a PV interconnect agreement and meet the design and inspection requirements.
Systems up to 100 kilowatts qualify, which is far above what a residential project needs, so the size limit is unlikely to be your binding constraint. The credit expiry is.
The credits expire, and the date is yours not the calendar
The city states it plainly: credits carry over month to month, but not year to year. Whatever is unused when the year ends is gone, not paid out and not carried forward.
The reset happens according to your net metering anniversary date rather than at the end of a calendar year. So two neighbours with identical systems can have entirely different reset months, and generic advice about year end true-ups does not tell you when yours falls.
Find out your anniversary date and write it down. It determines which season your credit bank is drawing down into, and whether a summer surplus has a winter to be spent in or expires before it gets there.
An anniversary falling just after summer is the unfavourable case, because it wipes the surplus the productive months just built. An anniversary in late spring is the favourable one. You may not be able to choose it, but you should know it.
What annual expiry does to the right system size
Because unused credits expire annually, capacity that generates beyond your yearly consumption is worth nothing at all. Not less, nothing. That puts a firm ceiling on useful system size at roughly your annual usage.
This is the opposite of the sizing logic in markets where surplus is bought at year end, and it is the single most common way a Tallahassee system gets oversold. A quote that fills the available roof is optimising for the installer revenue, not your return.
Ask for the system modelled against your own twelve months of billing history, and ask what share of generated kilowatt hours the model expects you to actually use or bank successfully before expiry.
Then ask what happens if your consumption falls, because it often does after a household starts paying attention to its bill. A system sized exactly to current usage becomes oversized the moment you become more efficient.
Financing on the utility bill, and the tax position
Tallahassee Utilities has offered low interest loans for solar photovoltaic systems repaid directly on the utility bill, with the programme also covering solar pool heating and solar water heating. Reported terms have been up to $20,000 at 5 percent over five to ten years.
Confirm the current amount, rate and term with the utility rather than relying on a figure in a quote, since loan programmes are revised more often than tariffs are. Repayment on the utility bill is convenient but it is still debt, so compare it against other financing on total cost.
Florida exempts the added value of a residential renewable energy source device from property tax and exempts equipment from sales tax. Those are state provisions and do not depend on which utility serves you.
The 30 percent Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after 31 December 2025, so a cash or loan purchase does not receive it. Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners, so a lease or PPA provider may still claim it and reflect part of the value in their rate.