August 4, 2026
In this New York Times feature, TPR excerpts reporting by Francesca Paris on the eroding economics of residential solar, following President Trump's repeal of the federal residential solar tax credit last year and a decade-long, state-by-state rollback of net metering — the rate mechanism, dating to the 1980s, that has underwritten rooftop solar's return on investment. More than a third of U.S. states have restructured their net metering rules over the past ten years, and in some cases the changes have cut homeowner savings by hundreds or thousands of dollars annually. The reporting traces how the transition is unfolding differently state to state, and why battery storage is emerging as the policy tool states are using to soften the blow.
