A municipal island in the middle of a deregulated region
Garland Power and Light is a municipally owned utility. Households in neighbouring Dallas, Plano, Richardson and Mesquite are in the deregulated market and choose retail electricity providers and solar buyback plans. Garland households do not.
That geographic quirk causes real confusion, because advice travels easily between neighbouring suburbs and does not survive the trip. A colleague in Plano describing the buyback plan they shopped for is describing a market you are not in, and the numbers do not carry across the city line.
It also means most online Texas solar calculators will produce a misleading answer for a Garland address, since they are built around retail plan selection. Treat any figure from one as a starting point for a question to Garland Power and Light rather than as an answer.
Use it to test an installer as well. Someone who has done work in Garland will know the program's 10 kilowatt limit and will mention the recovery adjustment factor without being prompted. Someone who offers to find you a better buyback plan has not worked here.
The program stops at 10 kilowatts
Garland Power and Light's solar interconnection program is available to customers with a solar or wind powered device that generates 10 kilowatts or less of electric power, at a voltage of 600 volts or less, from a residential customer's premises and operating in parallel with the City's electric utility system.
That is a hard ceiling to design against rather than discover late. For most Garland homes it is ample. It becomes a real constraint for a larger house, a home with electric heat, or a household charging an electric vehicle, where a designer working from annual consumption alone might reach past it and then have to start again.
Raise the limit in your first conversation with any installer and ask them to design within it from the outset. A system redesigned late is a system that costs you time and, often, a worse layout than one designed to the constraint from the beginning.
Confirm the current limit with Garland Power and Light directly rather than relying on this page or a quote. Program terms are set locally and can be revised, and it costs nothing to have the number confirmed by the people who apply it.
Your export credit tracks a factor that moves
Customers are entitled to a produced energy credit based on the energy produced and delivered into the City's electric utility system during a billing period. The customer is credited an amount equal to the recovery adjustment factor that the City has in place at the time of billing, multiplied by the energy delivered into the system.
Read that carefully, because it is unusual and it matters. Your export credit is not a fixed tariff written into an agreement. It is pegged to a factor the City sets, and it is applied at whatever level is in place when you are billed.
So a payback projection built on today's factor is a projection built on an assumption about the future, not a contract. Ask Garland Power and Light what the recovery adjustment factor is now, how often it is reviewed, and where it is published so that you can check it yourself later.
Then ask your installer to show the arithmetic at the current factor and again at a materially lower one. That sensitivity test is the honest way to look at a Garland project, and an installer who has thought about this market will not be surprised by the request.
Permits, the meter, and the exemption you must file for
The sequence in Garland is defined. Once the permitting process is complete, Building Inspections sends the solar project documents to Garland Power and Light, which installs a bi-directional meter allowing you to participate on the system as a distributed energy producer.
So there are two stages and a handoff between them, and the handoff is where projects quietly wait. Ask your installer to confirm when permitting closed and when the documents went to Garland Power and Light, rather than accepting a general assurance that everything is in progress. Panels on the roof without the bi-directional meter are not yet a system that earns you anything.
Texas Tax Code Section 11.27 exempts 100 percent of the appraised home value added by an installed solar energy device from property tax, but Form 50-123 must be filed with your county appraisal district, generally by April 30 for the current tax year. Nobody files it for you. Ask whether your installer assists and diarise it regardless.
The federal credit position has changed: the 30 percent Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners under leases and power purchase agreements. If you are in an association, Texas Property Code Section 202.010 forbids it from prohibiting a solar energy device, and House Bill 431, effective May 29, 2025, extended that to solar roof tiles.