Why does HyreSolar use EIA-861 rather than industry figures?

Form EIA-861 is the annual census every US electric utility is required to file, so it counts the same thing the same way in every state. Industry-association figures are usually assembled from member reporting with uneven coverage. EIA-861 lags by roughly two years, and that lag is the price of comparability.

What is the difference between a HyreSolar calculation and a published statistic?

A published statistic is a number as its source published it. A HyreSolar calculation is arithmetic performed on published figures — a rate, a rank, a share, a per-customer average. Every calculated figure is labelled as one on the page, and the operation is stated so it can be reproduced from the source.

How often is the underlying data updated?

When the source releases a new edition, not on a fixed calendar. EIA-861 publishes annually with a lag, so a page can be current and still show a two-year-old year. Pages carry a reviewed date, and the date changes only when something on the page substantively changed.

Can I get the underlying data?

Yes. The data page generates two CSV downloads at build time from the same dataset the pages read, so the file and the page cannot disagree. Derived columns are labelled as HyreSolar calculations in the file header.

Research

Research Methodology

How the numbers on this site are produced, what we derive ourselves, and how you can tell the difference.

Last updated September 3, 2026.

Almost every solar statistic in circulation is second-hand. A figure appears in a trade report drawn from a partial survey, a listicle takes it from the report, and by the third repetition nobody can say what was counted, in which year, or against what denominator. This page exists so that our figures are not that.

Source hierarchy

We work down this list and stop at the highest tier that answers the question. Where a claim cannot be supported from any of them, we publish the shorter page without it.

Federal agency dataEIA, DOE, IRS and the statute itself. Our first choice for anything quantitative or legal.
State agency rulesEnergy offices, utility commissions, revenue departments and licensing boards.
Utility filings and tariffsWhat a specific utility actually charges and pays, which is frequently different from the state-level summary.
Research institutionsNational laboratories and academic work, where a question needs analysis we cannot do ourselves.
Manufacturer documentationDatasheets and warranty documents, for equipment specifics.

We do not build figures from other content sites, marketplace quote data or installer marketing material.

Why Form EIA-861 carries most of the analysis

Filing Form EIA-861 is a legal obligation for every electric utility operating in the United States. That makes it a census rather than a sample: no sampling error, and no participating-company bias.

It records residential sales, revenue and customer accounts; net-metered installations and capacity; batteries paired with them; metering and demand response; and reliability indices — utility by utility, year by year. We use the 11 annual releases covering 2014 to 2024, downloaded as the published archives and extracted by script.

What EIA does not publish is the arithmetic between those columns. There is no official figure for the share of households with rooftop solar, for battery attachment, for consumption per account, or for how any of these rank between states. Those are the figures we compute, across all 51 jurisdictions.

Three labels, kept separate

HyreSolar labels every number as a published statistic, a HyreSolar calculation or an estimate. That distinction is the one most often blurred elsewhere, and keeping it visible is what makes a figure checkable.

Label	What it means	Example
Source data	A figure reported directly by the named source, reproduced without modification.	EIA reports 5,077,543 residential net-metered installations in 2024.
HyreSolar calculation	Arithmetic we performed on source data. EIA publishes the inputs; it does not publish this output.	Dividing installations by residential accounts to get household penetration.
HyreSolar interpretation	What we think a figure means. An argument, not a measurement, and labelled so you can disagree with it.	That adoption tracks retail price more closely than solar resource.

We never present our own calculation as an official statistic, and we never present an interpretation as a measurement.

How the derivation was checked

The check that makes everything else credible is external rather than internal.

Our residential price derivation — revenue divided by sales, per state per year — reproduces EIA's own published state price series across 357 overlapping state-years to within 0.005¢/kWh. EIA rounds to two decimal places, so that difference is rounding and nothing else.

Every consumption, bill and penetration figure we publish is built from the same handled quantities, and inherits that validation.

Dates on everything

Retrieved date — when we took the data from the source. On every dataset.
Data vintage — which release the figures come from. EIA-861 lags roughly two years; we use final releases only and exclude partial early releases, because mixing the two produces a break that looks like a finding.
Last reviewed — when a person last checked the page. Not when it was generated.
Effective date — on anything time-sensitive, such as an incentive or a statutory change, with the source that establishes it.

Limitations that apply to everything

Net-metered systems only. Capacity under buyback, feed-in or utility-owned arrangements sits on a separate schedule and is excluded from our installation counts.
Accounts, not buildings. Penetration counts residential electricity accounts, which is not identical to households or dwellings.
Means, not medians. The source contains no median, so averages are pulled upward by a small number of large systems.
Small populations are volatile. Where counts are low, ratios swing on small absolute changes. Read the count alongside any rate.
The data lags. Roughly two years. It describes a market that has moved since.
A market is not your house. No figure we publish is an estimate for your property, your tariff or your tax position.

When we are wrong

We publish figures precisely so they can be checked. If you find an error, tell us — name the page and the number. We check it against the source and either correct it or explain why it stands.

Corrections are made in place, on the page that carried the error, rather than by quietly deleting it. Our editorial policy covers independence and how commercial relationships are kept away from this.

Citing and reusing our work

Free to use with attribution to HyreSolar and a link to the page you took it from. The data downloads give you the underlying tables as CSV, generated from the same dataset the pages read.

Standing sources

US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Net Metering (annual files, 2014–2024) Utility-level net-metered capacity, installations and energy sold back by state and customer sector, plus PV-paired battery capacity and installations from 2023. Downloaded as the published annual ZIP archives. Retrieved 2 September 2026
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Sales to Ultimate Customers (annual files, 2014–2024) Utility-level residential revenue, sales and customer counts by state, used to derive the average residential price and to count the households a state actually meters. Retrieved 2 September 2026
US EIA, Form EIA-861 — Distributed Generation that is not Net Metered (2024) Residential photovoltaic capacity served under buyback, feed-in and utility-owned arrangements rather than net metering. Capacity only; this schedule collects no installation count. Retrieved 2 September 2026
US EIA, Average Price of Electricity to Ultimate Customers by End-Use Sector EIA’s own published state price series, used only to validate our derivation. Agreement across all 357 overlapping state-years is within 0.005¢/kWh, i.e. EIA’s own rounding. Retrieved 2 September 2026

HyreSolar analysis of EIA data, retrieved 2 September 2026. HyreSolar is an independent solar information platform and does not install, finance, maintain or service solar systems.

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