One application, filed online, covering the electrical work too
Most residential one and two-family rooftop solar PV systems in Raleigh are eligible for online permitting through the city's Permit Portal. More usefully, the city includes the electrical permit within the residential building permit application, so no separate electrical application is required for a rooftop array.
That is worth appreciating, because in most jurisdictions the electrical permit is a second filing with its own queue, sometimes handled by a different body entirely. Consolidating it removes a common source of delay and of the confusion where each party assumes the other filed it.
It does not remove the need to agree who does the filing. Ask your installer directly whether they will submit through the Permit Portal and what the application will contain, and get it in writing. An installer working in Raleigh regularly should know that the electrical permit is bundled; one who quotes you a separate electrical permit fee has probably not filed here.
The city runs an Ask Raleigh Permit Helpline on 919-996-2500. Use it before equipment is ordered rather than after a submission is returned: a short call confirming what your specific property needs is cheaper than a resubmission.
Duke no longer offers flat retail net metering to new customers
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 instead. This is the single most important change for anyone comparing quotes in Raleigh, and it is recent enough that a great deal of published advice still describes the old arrangement.
Under flat retail net metering, an exported kilowatt hour offset one you bought later at the same price, so the timing of your generation barely mattered. Under time-differentiated rates it matters a great deal: what your solar is worth depends on when it is produced and when you consume, and a system that looked good under the old rules may look quite different under the new ones.
Two things follow. First, treat any payback figure from before the change as describing a different product, including a neighbour's real experience if they connected earlier. They are not being dishonest; they are on a different arrangement. Second, ask your installer which specific rate option they have modelled, and to show the same system under the alternatives available to you.
Ask Duke directly which options a new residential solar customer can choose between at your address, and what the differences mean across a year rather than a month. That answer, more than the size of your roof, determines what the system is worth.
The benefit that never arrives as a cheque
North Carolina excludes most of the added assessed home value of a residential active solar heating, cooling or electric system from property tax. In plain terms, the improvement does not raise your property tax bill the way an equivalent renovation of similar cost would.
This gets overlooked because it is invisible: there is no application to file, no cheque, and nothing appears on a quote. It is simply a cost that does not arrive. Over the life of a system that is a real number, and it is worth adding to your own arithmetic even though no installer will hand it to you.
It also removes an objection people sometimes raise, that a visible improvement will be reassessed and taxed. In North Carolina most of that added value is excluded, so the concern does not apply here in the way it might elsewhere.
The federal credit no longer applies to a purchase
The 30 percent federal 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 purchase in Raleigh now cannot claim it.
Combined with Duke's move away from flat retail net metering, that is two changes to the economics in quick succession, and much of what is published has not caught up with either. A quote, guide or calculator that applies the credit or assumes legacy net metering is describing an earlier year, which is usually staleness rather than dishonesty, but the payback figure it produces is wrong in both directions at once.
Ask any installer to rebuild the arithmetic from what still exists: the rate option you will actually be on, the property tax exclusion, and the electricity you stop buying. If a salesperson resists producing that version, the resistance is itself informative.
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 they offer. What they claim and what reaches you are separate questions, so put both to the provider and confirm with a tax advisor rather than with the sales material.