The ZIPs around Celina hold about 3,100 single-family lots of an acre or more, and most of the houses on them went up this century.
Land, with a subdivision around it, is what makes Celina a different job.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
In Celina that has three possible answers, and the city says so itself — different neighbourhoods are served by different providers depending on where the house sits.
The answer changes how we size your system more than anything else on this page does.
On GCEC lines you cannot shop for a provider, and in exchange you get something almost nobody in Texas still offers: kilowatt-hour netting at the full retail rate.
Every unit you send back takes a unit off your bill, and what you do not use is banked for the following month.
Going solar moves you onto the co-op's distributed generation rate, and that rate carries a $40 monthly base charge where the ordinary residential rate carries $25.
There is also a one-time $40 application fee, billed after the net meter goes in.
So the netting is not free — it costs about fifteen dollars a month.
That flips the usual arithmetic.
A bigger array keeps earning at the retail rate instead of dropping to an export rate, so the ceiling is your land and your budget rather than your own consumption.
CoServ buys all of it and sells all of it back, and has done since February 2023.
Exported energy earns CoServ's avoided wholesale cost — 8.5 cents a kilowatt hour in September 2026 — well under the rate you pay to import.
Credits are a dollar amount and unused ones carry forward.
There is a $25 monthly minimum, a $10 customer charge plus a $15 distributed generation charge, and the credit is allowed to offset it.
On CoServ the question is not how big an array will fit, it is how much of your own use it covers, because every kilowatt hour that leaves the property is worth a fraction of one you keep.
On Oncor lines you pick the company that bills you.
Oncor owns the wires and delivers the power; it does not buy any of it back — your retail provider does, on whatever terms that plan carries, and you can change providers when the contract ends.
Celina permits solar by right in every zoning district, and then tells you where it may stand.
A ground-mounted device is not allowed in a front yard, it takes the accessory-structure setbacks for your zoning district, and it has to be screened by a wooden or masonry fence with no part of the array extending above the fence line.
Where the subdivision does not allow fences, the screen is a solid evergreen hedge kept at six feet or more.
The fees are published too, in the city's solar permit packet: $50 to apply, $75 for plan review and $100 for the permit.
Outside the city limits, Texas counties have no general authority to require a building permit for ordinary single-family construction, and neither Collin nor Denton publishes one that reaches a residential array.
Septic setbacks, floodplain rules and your utility's interconnection approval still apply, so it removes one office rather than all of them.
The city also wants your HOA's approval letter in the packet, so those two conversations happen together rather than one after the other.
Celina is clay, and the soil survey did not equivocate about it.
We pulled it at four points around the city and got clay at all four — the only city in our footprint where the sample came back the same every time.
That is Blackland Prairie, and Blackland clay moves.
It swells when it is wet and shrinks when it is not, which walks a shallow foundation through the seasons and can rotate a row of panels a few degrees off where it started.
The answer is not a deeper trench, it is a foundation that reaches below the zone that moves — a decision made from the soil map for your parcel, not a county average.
Four points is a sample, not a survey.
It is a consistent one here, which is more than we can say for most cities we serve.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,536 kWh a year for every kW installed at Celina's latitude.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,400 kWh a year.
What that is worth depends entirely on which of the three utilities above sends your bill.
The same array earns retail on GCEC lines and about eight and a half cents an exported unit on CoServ lines.
Yours will differ a little either way.
The design tool runs your actual coordinates and accounts for which way your land faces and what is shading it.
If you are in an HOA, Texas law is on your side but only so far. The state stops an HOA banning solar outright.
It also lets an HOA prohibit a ground mount that sits anywhere other than a roof or a fenced yard.
Inside a fenced yard there is a second rule: the array cannot stand taller than the fence.
In Celina the fence rule is not only an HOA rule.
The city applies it to everyone: the array is screened by a fence and no part of it stands above the fence line.
Roughly three quarters of the houses in these ZIPs were built in 2000 or later, so most readers will be answering to both the city and an association.
That is a design we build rather than an argument we have.
Lower tilt, or two panels high instead of four, and it fits under the fence.
Nobody drills your roof, so there is nothing to re-flash when the roof gets replaced.
The panels point south at the angle we choose instead of wherever the builder pointed the house.
And a ground mount grows — a shop, a well pump, a second EV — where a roof has an edge. Ground mount vs rooftop
No taller than the fence screening it.
The city's rule is that a ground-mounted device is screened by a wooden or masonry fence and does not extend above the fence line — so your fence height is the array height, and that is settled before we draw anything.
If your subdivision does not allow fences, the screen is a solid evergreen hedge kept at six feet or more within eighteen months of planting.
No.
Celina prohibits a ground-mounted device in a front yard, and unlike a height rule that one has no design workaround.
We look at the rest of the parcel instead — on an acre the sunny corner is rarely the only option.
It depends which street you are on, and Celina is unusual for having three answers.
On Grayson-Collin lines you get kilowatt-hour netting at the retail rate, which is rare in Texas now.
On CoServ lines the export is bought at avoided cost, about eight and a half cents in September 2026.
On Oncor lines you choose a retail provider and the plan sets it.
We confirm which before quoting.
On Grayson-Collin, often yes — the extra kilowatt hours keep their retail value, and the monthly cost of the distributed generation rate is the same whatever size you build.
On CoServ the opposite is true and the array wants sizing to your own use.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
