Two utilities serve Cleveland, and they are not interchangeable
Cleveland Public Power is a city-owned utility serving 74,000 customers within Cleveland. The Illuminating Company, part of FirstEnergy, serves 700,000 customers across northeast Ohio, with territory covering most of Cuyahoga County and parts of surrounding counties. They serve different parts of the city, so a Cleveland household has one or the other rather than a choice between them.
The difference is not cosmetic. If Cleveland Public Power is your utility you are not eligible for Energy Choice Ohio, the programme that lets customers shop for an electricity supplier. Illuminating Company customers can choose their supplier. That alone tells you the two operate under different arrangements, and it should make you cautious about any general Ohio solar advice applied to your address without checking.
Cleveland Public Power does offer net metering, to residential and non-residential customers who purchase their requirements of electric service from it under the applicable rate schedule and who own and operate distributed generation. It also publishes its own procedure for customers to interconnect small generation, which is a separate document from anything a FirstEnergy utility uses.
So the first step is to read the name on your bill, and the second is to ask that utility for its own interconnection procedure and net metering terms in writing. Ask your installer which of the two they have interconnected with in Cleveland and when. An installer who treats the city as one jurisdiction has not done a job on both sides of it.
How Ohio credits exports, and the true-up that varies by utility
The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio governs solar interconnection and net metering for the state's investor-owned utilities: AEP's Ohio Power Company, Duke Energy Ohio, AES Ohio, and FirstEnergy's three Ohio utilities, which include the Illuminating Company. The Ohio statute requires credits to be valued at the full retail rate, which is a better arrangement than the supply-only or avoided-cost crediting used in some neighbouring states.
Excess credits that accumulate beyond a monthly bill roll forward as kilowatt-hour credits to subsequent months rather than converting to cash payments. So you are banking energy, not earning income, and the value of that bank depends entirely on your consuming it later.
The detail that should shape your system size is the annual true-up, and it is not uniform. Annual true-up provisions vary by utility tariff: some Ohio utilities reset accumulated credits to zero at the end of a 12-month period, forfeiting any remaining balance, and others permit indefinite rollover. Those two are very different deals. Under a forfeiting tariff, generation beyond your annual consumption is simply lost each year; under indefinite rollover it is not.
Ask your utility directly which of the two applies to you and on what date the 12-month period ends. Then size the array to twelve months of your own kilowatt hour totals rather than to the roof area available, because under a resetting tariff the roof-area approach donates the surplus back.
Fewer than half of Cleveland homes have a roof one household controls
Cleveland's housing stock totals 201,141 units per the Census Bureau's 2020-2024 American Community Survey estimates, and single-detached houses account for 45.9 percent of them. That is a minority, which makes Cleveland unusual among large American cities for solar purposes: fewer than half of households here can simply commission an array.
Two-unit duplexes are 14.5 percent of the stock, and a duplex means two households share one roof and one decision. That is an agreement to be settled in writing before a design exists, covering fixings and penetrations, access for maintenance, and who pays when the covering is replaced. It is a smaller negotiation than a building, but it is a negotiation.
Buildings of 20 or more apartments are 17.6 percent, and buildings of 5 to 19 units add 8.5 percent combined. In all of those the roof belongs to the building owner, so the route is a written proposal to the owner covering cost, ownership of the equipment, insurance and roof replacement, rather than a quote for your unit. That is a different piece of work from getting three quotes, and it is worth knowing before you start.
If you are in the 45.9 percent with a detached house, the rest is straightforward: orientation, shading and roof covering. A south-facing unshaded plane produces the most, shading costs the most because it removes midday production, and a covering within a few years of replacement should be replaced before the array goes on rather than paying later to remove and reinstall it.
Output, and the federal credit that no longer applies
Plan on roughly 1,176 kilowatt hours a year for every kilowatt installed on a well oriented, unshaded array. That figure is a screening number derived from irradiance data rather than a measurement from local roofs, so treat it as a ceiling for your address and expect orientation and shading to move it.
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 Cleveland today cannot claim it. That is a large change, because the credit was big enough to carry a substantial part of a residential project, and removing it lengthens payback and changes whether adding a battery makes sense.
Be aware that a great deal of published material has not been updated. A quote, an online calculator or a guide that still applies the credit is not necessarily dishonest, but the payback figure that follows from it is wrong. Ask any installer to show you the arithmetic without it, and treat reluctance as informative.
If you take a lease or a power purchase agreement instead of 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 actually reaches you are different questions, so put them to the provider directly and confirm with a tax advisor rather than relying on sales material.