Southeast Colorado Power Association has served the Arkansas Valley and the surrounding plains for 85 years. It is a member owned, not for profit cooperative headquartered in La Junta, and its lines reach across roughly 10 counties in the southeastern corner of the state, including Otero, Bent, Crowley, Prowers, Baca, Las Animas, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Lincoln, and rural stretches of Pueblo and El Paso counties. Towns like La Junta, Lamar, Springfield, Rocky Ford, Ordway, Las Animas, Fowler, Swink, and Cheyenne Wells all sit inside SECPA territory.

This post walks through Southeast Colorado Power Association solar in full. It covers who the co-op serves, how the net metering tariff actually works, the annual true-up that decides whether banked credits are worth full price or wholesale price, the tariff revision taking effect this year, how a battery changes the math on a long rural feeder, sizing a system for a home or a farm, and the Colorado incentive stack alongside the 25 percent up front federal incentive.

SECPA’s footprint is wide and thin. Members are spread across small towns and farm and ranch properties rather than dense subdivisions, and irrigation, grain storage, and livestock operations pull real weight on the co-op’s system alongside residential meters. That mix shows up in the rate schedules themselves. Alongside a standard residential tariff, SECPA runs dedicated schedules for farm and home service, irrigation water pumping, and demand metered irrigation, which tells you how much of the co-op’s business runs through agriculture.

For a solar shopper, two things follow from this territory. First, roofs and open land are rarely the constraint that they are in a Denver subdivision. Ground mounts and larger residential arrays are common and practical here. Second, distances between the co-op’s substations and rural meters run long, so outages from wind, ice, or a downed line tend to last longer than they do inside a city grid. Both facts point toward right sizing the array to your usage and taking a serious look at battery backup rather than assuming a bigger system is automatically the better one.

Southeast Colorado Power Association’s net metering program runs under Schedule NM, and it starts with a system size limit. A residential customer generator is capped at 10 kilowatts of generating capacity, while a non-residential customer generator can go up to 25 kilowatts. The tariff applies to solar, wind, biomass, or hydropower systems, and the array has to be sized to offset the electrical needs of the specific location where it sits. You cannot build oversized generation at one meter and use it to offset usage at another property.

Before anything gets turned on, SECPA requires an approved interconnection agreement, and the system has to connect in parallel with the co-op’s distribution grid using metering equipment capable of tracking flow in both directions. If your project needs metering beyond what SECPA normally provides, you cover that differential cost. None of this is unusual for a Colorado co-op, but the size caps and the parallel connection requirement are the two details every SECPA solar quote needs to get right from the start.

This is the part of the SECPA tariff that decides whether a solar system performs the way a homeowner expects. During any billing period where you pull more from the grid than your panels send back, SECPA bills you for the net electricity you consumed, same as any other customer. During a billing period where your panels send back more than you use, you pay only your customer charge and any applicable minimums, and the surplus, measured in kilowatt hours, banks forward to the next billing period on a one to one basis.

That banking runs month to month, which lets a strong summer production month offset a weak winter month elsewhere in the year. But the bank does not carry forever. Once a year, at the close of the calendar year, SECPA credits any kilowatt hours still sitting unused in your account, and it does so at Tri-State Generation and Transmission’s current wholesale rate for energy rather than the retail rate a customer normally pays. That wholesale rate runs well below what you would have paid for the same power at the meter, so a kilowatt hour you use yourself is worth far more than one you bank and let true up at year end. Our guide on how Colorado net metering works for solar homeowners walks through this credit mechanic in more general terms, and the same logic applies here with SECPA’s specific once a year settlement.

The takeaway for anyone sizing a system is simple. Design the array to match your own consumption as closely as you reasonably can, rather than building for maximum output and assuming every surplus kilowatt hour comes back to you at full value. It will not.

SECPA’s board of directors approved a revision to Schedule NM, the co-op’s net metering tariff, effective May 1, 2026. The revised sheet cancels the original version and carries forward the same core structure, the 10 kilowatt residential and 25 kilowatt non-residential caps, the interconnection requirement, and the one to one monthly banking with an annual true-up at Tri-State’s wholesale rate. Co-ops periodically update these tariffs as their own power supply costs and board policy shift, and a revision is the moment small details, like the exact true-up timing or administrative fees, can change.

If you got a solar quote from SECPA territory before May 2026, it is worth asking your installer to confirm the numbers against the current tariff sheet rather than an older one. The full document is posted on SECPA’s rates and policies page, and any Apollo Energy proposal for a SECPA member pulls directly from the current version.

A grid tied solar array with no battery goes dark during an outage. That is a safety requirement built into every inverter, not a flaw specific to this co-op. Rapid shutdown protects line crews working on what they assume is a dead line, so your panels stop producing the moment the grid drops, whether or not you are standing in your kitchen wondering why the lights went out too.

A battery changes that equation, and it matters more here than it does closer to Denver. SECPA’s long rural feeders across the Arkansas Valley and the eastern plains mean a wind event, an ice storm, or a vehicle hitting a pole can leave a property without power for hours rather than minutes. A right sized battery keeps a well pump, a freezer full of a season’s harvest, a furnace fan, and a security system running through that gap. It also captures the value the true-up rate takes away. Instead of banking midday surplus and cashing it out a year later at a wholesale rate, a battery lets you store that same surplus and use it yourself after dark, at full retail value, every single day. Our whole home battery backup guide for Colorado covers sizing storage for outage protection in more depth.

Because unused credits eventually settle at a lower rate, the right approach for a SECPA solar project starts with your actual annual usage rather than your roof’s maximum capacity. Pull twelve months of bills and build from there.

For most year-round households in La Junta, Lamar, or Rocky Ford, an array between 5 and 10 kilowatts sized to usage is the sensible range. Our residential solar installation page covers the equipment and design process our crews use across southeastern Colorado, and Apollo serves SECPA members alongside our broader Pueblo area service territory.

The federal residential solar incentive in 2026 is worth roughly 25 percent of the total project cost up front. That basis is broad, covering panels, inverters, racking, wiring, labor, permits, and interconnection fees, and it extends to battery storage when the battery charges primarily from your own array. On a $22,000 SECPA solar project, that works out to roughly $5,500 back. On a $34,000 solar plus battery project, it is closer to $8,500.

Three Colorado state layers stack alongside the federal incentive. The sales and use tax exemption removes state tax from solar equipment, and it shows up as a missing line item on your quote rather than something you claim later. The property tax exemption means the county assessor does not raise your home’s valuation because you added solar, and that exemption carries over if you sell the property. The 10 percent residential energy storage credit, filed on form DR-1307, covers battery equipment cost, sales tax, and freight, though it excludes labor and permit fees.

That storage credit is the one piece of this stack with a hard deadline. It is non-refundable, it cannot be carried forward to a future tax year, and it expires December 31, 2026. A battery placed in service on or after January 1, 2027 forfeits it completely. Our Colorado battery storage tax credit guide for 2026 covers the DR-1307 filing mechanics in detail.

Southeastern Colorado brings its own installation realities. Wind load is a serious engineering consideration here, with racking and attachment specs that need to match the exposure of an open plains property rather than a sheltered subdivision lot. Hail is a real risk across the region too, and panel selection should account for it the same way it does anywhere on Colorado’s eastern plains. Many SECPA properties also have outbuildings, detached shops, and irrigation infrastructure that change how a system gets wired and where the main disconnect makes the most sense.

None of this changes the fundamentals of a well designed SECPA solar project. It changes the details an installer needs to get right, and that is exactly the kind of local knowledge worth asking about before you sign a contract.

Southeast Colorado Power Association solar rewards a plan built around your own usage rather than maximum output. The 10 kilowatt residential cap sets the ceiling, the one to one monthly banking gives you real flexibility across the year, and the annual true-up at Tri-State’s wholesale rate is the detail that should shape how large you build. Add a battery for resilience on a grid with long rural feeders, and you capture value the true-up would otherwise take off the table.

For a homeowner or farm operation anywhere in La Junta, Lamar, Springfield, or the wider Arkansas Valley, timing matters. The Colorado 10 percent residential storage credit expires December 31, 2026 and cannot be carried forward. The 25 percent up front federal incentive applies to the full project basis today. Every year of rising grid costs strengthens the case for producing your own power on your own land.