What the Farwig decision settled
North Carolina General Statute 22B-20 restricts covenants and other instruments that would prohibit or effectively prohibit the installation of solar collectors on residential property. The word doing the work there is effectively, and that is what the Supreme Court of North Carolina addressed in Belmont Association, Inc. v. Farwig in 2022.
In that case the homeowners had installed panels on the street-facing side of their home and the association denied the request on aesthetic grounds under its declaration of protective covenants. The court held that those restrictions effectively prohibited the installation and therefore violated the statute.
The practical effect is worth stating plainly. An architectural review committee cannot rely on a general power to approve or reject on appearance in order to keep panels off a street-facing roof. Prohibiting street-facing panels requires rules that expressly do so, not a general aesthetic discretion applied to reach that result.
So when an association points to a general appearance clause, that is the moment to read the actual covenants closely rather than accept the conclusion. This page is not legal advice and your covenants are specific to your community, so if the answer matters and the association is resisting, the sensible next step is an hour with a North Carolina attorney who handles community association law.
How to approach the association without a fight
Knowing the law does not mean leading with it. Most architectural review committees are neighbours doing a volunteer job, and an application that arrives complete and specific is approved far more often than one that arrives as an argument.
Submit the layout, the mounting method, the panel and frame colour, and where any visible conduit will run. Committees are usually reacting to uncertainty about how something will look rather than to solar as such, and a drawing removes most of that uncertainty.
Ask your installer whether they have taken projects through your specific association before. In a town the size of Cary an installer who works here regularly will have dealt with many of the larger associations and will know what each has asked for in the past.
Keep the correspondence in writing. If an application is denied, a written denial that states the reason is what makes the next conversation, legal or otherwise, a short one.
Permits, and a public record you can look up
Under Cary's Land Development Ordinance, home solar installations including photovoltaic cells and solar water heaters are allowed everywhere in Cary. Installation is regulated through Cary's building permit process and reviewed for compliance with the Land Development Ordinance and the North Carolina Building and Electrical Code.
Zoning, in other words, is not your obstacle in Cary. The review is a code review, and the association question above is a private covenant question that sits alongside it rather than inside it.
Cary also does something genuinely useful for anyone comparing installers: the town publishes a Solar Permit Applications dataset on its open data portal. That is a public record of solar permit activity in the town, and it is a better check on an installer's claim to work locally than asking the installer.
Use it before you sign. If a company tells you it has done a great deal of work in Cary, the town's own record is the place to see what has actually been filed, and it costs nothing to look.
The two changes that moved the arithmetic
Cary is served by Duke Energy Progress, and Duke Energy no longer offers legacy flat retail net metering to new residential solar customers. New customers are placed on time-differentiated net-metering or bridge rate options, so what your generation is worth depends on when it happens rather than only on how much of it there is.
That is a real change for a household that is out during the day. Under the old flat arrangement an exported kilowatt hour offset one you bought later at the same price and timing barely mattered. Under time-differentiated rates it matters a great deal, and a battery or a shifted vehicle-charging schedule can change the answer.
The federal position has changed too. The 30 percent residential tax credit under Section 25D applied through December 31, 2025 and is not available for a purchased home system placed in service after that date. A neighbour who installed in 2024 had both the credit and legacy net metering, so their payback figure is accurate for their project and is not a guide to yours.
If you take a lease or a power purchase agreement rather than buying, the provider may claim the business version of the credit under Section 48E and reflect part of that value in the rate offered, so ask what they claim and what reaches you, and confirm with a tax advisor. North Carolina's property tax exclusion for most of the added assessed value of a residential solar system still applies and needs no application.