Choosing a solar installer in your South Carolina town

What changed in South Carolina, and why older advice is wrong

Three things moved in sequence, and together they reset the arithmetic. One-for-one net metering closed to new applicants on 1 June 2021. Full-retail grandfathering for customers who applied before 16 May 2019 ran out on 31 December 2025. And the federal residential credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026.

The practical result is that payback in South Carolina is longer than the figures still published on national comparison sites, which mostly have not been updated. If you are working from an article that applies a 30% federal credit, the net cost it shows you is wrong by thousands of dollars. It is the first thing to check on anything you read, including a quote.

What did not change is the 25% South Carolina state credit on Form TC-38, capped at $3,500 in any one tax year and at 50% of your state liability, with a ten-year carry-forward. Because of that annual cap, most residential systems are claimed across two or three returns rather than recovered at once. Confirm your own eligibility with a tax professional.

None of this makes solar a bad decision here. It makes it a decision that has to be worked rather than assumed, and one where which utility bills you now matters more than it ever has.

Five utilities, five different answers

South Carolina is served by investor-owned utilities, the state-owned Santee Cooper, and a set of member-owned cooperatives, and each sets residential solar terms through a different mechanism. Dominion Energy South Carolina and the two Duke utilities are inside the state’s net energy metering chapter and under Public Service Commission ratemaking, so their terms are published and reviewable. Santee Cooper’s board sets its own. A cooperative board adopts its own policy and reports it to the Office of Regulatory Staff.

That is why there is no such thing as the South Carolina export rate, and why any page quoting one is quoting Dominion’s without saying so. It is also why the first thing we ask for is a bill rather than an address.

In the Charleston metro the point is sharper still, because Dominion and Berkeley Electric territory interleave. Daniel Island, where our office sits, has both. Two houses on the same street can be on different providers with different export terms, and no postcode-level assumption resolves it.

What does not change from town to town

The crew is ours in every market. A large share of residential solar in the Southeast is sold by one company and installed by a subcontractor the homeowner never meets, which becomes your problem the day a penetration needs revisiting. The person who surveys your roof works for the same business as the person who warranties it.

The roof-penetration warranty is ours and is held for the life of the roof, rather than passed through to a manufacturer. That matters because once the modules are on, the flashing detail underneath is the part you can never inspect.

And the willingness to tell you no travels too. Heavy shading, a roof with only a few years left, or genuinely low usage are all reasons we will say a system does not make sense, and we would rather say it before anything is ordered than after.

How to use these pages

Start with your town rather than the state. Every page below is grouped by the utility that serves it, because that is the variable doing the most work, and a statewide average is a number that applies to nobody in particular.

Then check the assumption behind any figure you are comparing. Two quotes for a similar system can differ enormously on their twenty-five year totals purely because of what each assumed about export credits and rate escalation, and neither assumption is usually stated on the front page.

If your town is not listed, it is worth asking rather than assuming we do not cover it. We install statewide from a Daniel Island office, and the page list reflects where we have enough verified local detail to publish something useful rather than the limit of where we work.

What we need to give you a real number

Twelve months of electricity usage. Not one bill, twelve. A system sized from a summer peak is oversized for the year and one sized from a mild month disappoints every August, and neither error is visible until the system is on the roof. Twelve months also shows us the shape of your consumption across the day, which is what determines how much of your own production you will actually use rather than export.

Confirmation of who serves your meter, read off the bill rather than inferred from your address. In the Charleston metro especially, territory boundaries run between streets, and modelling the wrong provider produces a confident answer to the wrong question.

Some idea of your roof: its age, its covering, and whether anything has grown up around it since you moved in. Roof age is the detail that most often changes our recommendation, because installing over a roof with a few years left means paying to remove and reinstall the array later.

And your own horizon. A household planning to move within a few years is making a resale decision rather than a payback decision, and those are different questions with genuinely different answers. Telling us early saves everyone a survey.

With those four things we can give you figures rather than a projection built on averages. Without them, anyone quoting you a payback period is guessing with a straight face.

Common questions

Does Sunburst install across all of South Carolina?

Yes. We are headquartered on Daniel Island and install statewide, as well as in Georgia and Virginia. What changes town to town is your utility, county and roof, not our crew or our warranty.

Why does my utility matter so much?

Because South Carolina has investor-owned utilities, a state-owned generator and member-owned cooperatives, each setting export terms through a different mechanism. There is no single statewide export rate, and a page quoting one is usually quoting Dominion’s without saying so.

Is solar still worth it in South Carolina after 2026?

It is a harder case than it was. Net metering closed to new applicants on 1 June 2021, grandfathering for the earliest adopters ended 31 December 2025, and the federal credit expired for systems placed in service on or after 1 January 2026. The 25% state credit on Form TC-38 still applies. Whether it works depends on your utility, usage, roof and how long you will stay.

Do you use subcontractors?

No. Our crews are employees, and the roof-penetration warranty is held by us rather than passed through to a manufacturer.

My town is not listed. Do you cover it?

Probably. The list reflects where we have enough verified local detail to publish something useful, not the limit of where we work. It is worth asking.