Steve Morse

Why these pages carry a name at all

Most solar content is published anonymously. That is convenient for the publisher and useless for the reader: there is no way to judge whether the person writing has ever been on a roof, and nobody is accountable when a rate goes stale or a claim does not hold.

Every substantive page on this site is written by one of the two owners of Sunburst Solar Solutions and reviewed by the other. The byline names both. The review is real rather than decorative, and the rate and permit facts are dated on the page they appear on so you can see when they were last checked.

That arrangement has a cost we accept. It is slower than commissioning content, and it means we cannot publish about things we do not actually do. It also means that when a page declines to print a cooperative export figure because we have not confirmed it, that is a named person choosing not to guess rather than a content policy.

What review means here

The reviewer checks the page against what we actually file and install, not against a style guide. On a utility guide that means checking the described interconnection process against the paperwork we submit. On a cost page it means checking the benchmark against what we have recently quoted rather than against a published average.

Where a fact is genuinely unsettled, the review is what forces the page to say so instead of picking the flattering version. Georgia's property-tax treatment of residential solar is the live example: reputable sources variously describe a $25,000 exemption, a full exemption and no statewide exemption at all. Our pages send the reader to the Georgia Department of Revenue and their county assessor rather than choosing one.

The same review is what keeps the negative case on the page. Every location page carries an explicit list of who solar does not suit in that market, and those lists survive review precisely because the reviewer is the person who would have to install the system.

What we correct, and when

Solar policy in our three states has moved substantially and continues to. One-for-one net metering closed to new applicants in South Carolina on 1 June 2021, full-retail grandfathering for customers who applied before 16 May 2019 ran out on 31 December 2025, and the 30% federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. Virginia's retail net metering survived a contested proceeding at the State Corporation Commission in April 2026.

Each of those changes required revisiting pages that were accurate when published. That is the main reason facts are dated here: an undated figure asks to be trusted indefinitely, and none of this is stable enough to deserve that.

If you find something on this site that is out of date or wrong, the fastest route is to email the author directly using the address on this page. It reaches one of the two owners rather than a marketing inbox.

How to judge any solar content, including ours

Ask three questions. Who wrote it, and do they install? When were the figures last checked? And does the source name a specific utility, or does it quote a single statewide export rate as though one existed?

That third question eliminates most of what is published about South Carolina solar. The state is served by investor-owned utilities, the state-owned Santee Cooper and member-owned cooperatives, each setting export terms through a different mechanism, so a page quoting one number is quoting Dominion's without saying so.

A fourth is worth adding: does the source ever say solar is a bad idea? Content with no negative case is a sales document however it is formatted, and the absence is usually more informative than anything present.

Applied to comparison sites specifically, one test catches most of them quickly: check whether a 30% federal credit is still being applied to a 2026 system. A large share of that material has not been revised since the expiry, and because the error always runs in the same direction it leaves readers with a net cost that is thousands of dollars too low. Everything built on that figure (payback period, return, the comparison against doing nothing) is wrong by the same margin.

None of this is an argument that you should take our word instead. It is an argument for checking, which is a different thing, and the pages here are written to be checkable rather than persuasive.