BEATING THE CLOCK — Solar crews in Haywood County rushed to accommodate an over 200% increase in solar installations county wide this year.
A Sunday evening Taize service will be marked by a quiet celebration for All Saints Day with music that promises to be memorable.
RAISING THE ROOF — The metal roof at Grace Episcopal will have solar panels at some point in the next two years, something the church was able to lock down before federal rebates expired at the end of 2025.
BEATING THE CLOCK — Solar crews in Haywood County rushed to accommodate an over 200% increase in solar installations county wide this year.
A Sunday evening Taize service will be marked by a quiet celebration for All Saints Day with music that promises to be memorable.
RAISING THE ROOF — The metal roof at Grace Episcopal will have solar panels at some point in the next two years, something the church was able to lock down before federal rebates expired at the end of 2025.
The weather may be wintery, but for some in Haywood County, it’s all about sunshine — at least it is for the folks who opted to install solar panels in 2025. The county and the region as a whole saw a spike in solar power last year.
“It was crazy. We had to beef up our crews. We hired some extra people,” said James Fisher, director of Sales and Marketing at Sundance Power Systems, a solar power installer operating in WNC and upstate SC. Fisher said the trends in Haywood County matched the rest of their service area — 2025 was a busy year for solar installation.
“Crews were going into overtime, just trying to get these jobs installed,” Fisher said.
In 2024, 9 solar permits were filed in Haywood County. In 2025, that number jumped to 29 — a 222% increase.
One reason for that increase was a race to beat the expiration of federal solar tax credits at the end of 2025.
The Energy Policy Act was passed in 2005, and introduced a 30% tax credit for homeowners and businesses. A $2,000 residential cap was removed in 2008, and the 30% credit was extended to 2032 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
That all changed with the election of Donald Trump in 2024.
“Pretty much everybody in renewable energy, solar, wind, everything, was keenly aware that the new administration was not a supporter of renewables,” Fisher said.
The legislation commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act mandated that the Residential Clean Energy Credit sunset at the end of 2025 — meaning that to get the credit, homeowners would have to get their solar systems in place and functioning by that date. Commercial properties could have a little longer, but only if they begin physical construction by July 4, 2026, or are fully in service by December 31, 2027.
Thus, a “solar rush” hit not just in WNC, but the whole country, according to Fisher.
Grace Church in the Mountains, in Waynesville, is one of the Haywood County locations soon to be sporting solar panels, though “soon” is a bit of an overstatement, according to rector Joslyn Schaefer. And it’s been in the works for a while.
“We’ve been exploring solar for probably five or six years,” she said. We put on a new roof about three years ago, and when we did that, we made the decision that we wanted to make sure it was compatible with solar. We knew about these tax rebates that even nonprofits are eligible for that were going to be expiring at the end of 2025, and we just felt like our leadership team needed to really take that seriously.”
Grace Church went ahead and put down a 7% deposit on the solar panel project, which will cost $70,000 after the tax rebate.
“It’s called a safe harbor, so that (our installer) can go ahead and start purchasing some things for our project and it shows the government that we’re serious,” Schaefer said.
In the theology she espouses, Schaefer said taking care of the environment is inseparable from her larger faith.
“Grace has, over the years, made a really clear commitment to environmental stewardship. Stewardship is also theological term, and it acknowledges this isn’t, in an ultimate sense, our property, our planet. We’re going to walk lightly, as lightly as we can, with our all kinds of footprints, including our electrical bill,” she said.
Rising electrical costs are another impetus behind 2025’s surge in solar panel interest, according to William Hite, who chairs the town of Waynesville’s Environmental Sustainability Board. Hite and the ESB recently spearheaded efforts for the town to utilize a grant to purchase and install a solar and battery system on Waynesville’s public works building. And it could save the town as much as $9,000 in the first year, thanks to something called “peak pricing.”
“Whenever you get late in the afternoon and households are starting to turn on their things and businesses are still running their things, you enter the market where electricity is prohibitively expensive and the town pays that,” Hite said. “So whenever we hit peak demand, our cost is $17 per kilowatt hour. On a normal basis, it’s 3.7 cents per kilowatt hour.”
James Fisher compared the pricing model to Uber’s system.
“It’s like if you get an Uber to the concert, it costs you five bucks. You leave the concert when everybody else is trying to get out, it costs you three times that. That’s what the utilities are doing,” Fisher said.
“The average homeowner or business doesn’t know when those peaks are happening. They never see it because they just get an average bill instead of the levelized cost of energy,” Hite concluded.
Swapping over to a solar system during those peak hours is a great way to save on a bill during increasingly tough financial times. But of course, the moments most people are in their homes — mornings and evenings — aren’t prime solar collection time. That’s where battery systems come in. And in the wake of Helene, they are an increasingly popular option in WNC.
In the case of Grace Church, any energy the building collects beyond its day-to-day needs will be sold back into the power grid. But that doesn’t help at night, and it doesn’t help during major storms when the sun might be hidden for extended periods of times. And both things are concerns for a county that is shell-shocked in the wake of the last few years of catastrophic weather events.
“Even before the whole federal tax credit issue, we were coming out of Hurricane Helene. We had a bunch of folks after Helene who said, ‘Hey, I have a solar system. I need a battery now,’” Fisher said. “There’s also just a general interest in solar with batteries coming from Helene, from people who saw people in their neighborhood who had power when they were out for, you know, two weeks, three weeks.”
“That’s typically the way things work, is that one person does it, they see it, and then everybody else sort of falls in line and does it,” Hite agreed.
With the federal tax credit now expired, installing a solar system with or without a battery is a little trickier to implement, even for those motivated by Helene’s power-outage woes. It’s going to take a little extra push — not to mention a heftier bank balance — to make it happen. Still, Fisher said, the environmental aspects of solar are still a factor for many in WNC.
And then there’s a final factor — the constantly fluctuating price of gasoline.
“There’s a lot more electric vehicles out there,” Fisher said. “When you can charge your car through your own home solar, and avoid the gas station altogether, that sure is nice,” he said.
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$17 per KWH??? Wow! 😂
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