The ZIPs around Fairview hold about 7,000 single-family lots of an acre or more — more than any other town in this part of Collin County.
Fairview is also one of the few places that publishes what its solar permit costs, which tells you something about how the Town handles them.
First question: who sends your electric bill?
The Town lists three electric companies, and which one you are on decides whether your exported power is worth the retail rate or a fraction of it.
Nothing else on this page moves the arithmetic that far.
On GCEC lines you cannot shop for a provider, and in exchange you get kilowatt-hour netting at the full retail rate.
Every unit you send back takes a unit off your bill whether you used it or not, and unused units are banked for the following month.
Going solar moves you onto the distributed generation rate: a $40 monthly base charge where the ordinary residential rate carries $25, plus a one-time $40 application fee billed after the net meter is set.
The co-op states plainly that a $40 minimum bill stands even in a month you over-generate.
With retail netting the array can be sized to the land rather than to your own consumption, because the extra production keeps its full value instead of dropping to an export rate.
CoServ buys all of it and sells all of it back.
Exported energy earns CoServ's avoided wholesale cost — 8.5 cents a kilowatt hour in September 2026 — against a retail rate around twelve.
Credits are a dollar amount on the bill and unused ones carry forward.
A $25 monthly minimum, made up of a $10 customer charge and a $15 distributed generation charge, and the credit is allowed to offset it.
On CoServ the array wants sizing to your own daytime use, because a unit that leaves the property is worth roughly two thirds of one you keep.
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.
You can change providers when the contract ends, so it is the one arrangement here that is not fixed for the life of the array.
Fairview publishes the number: a residential solar PV permit is $175 on the Town's fee schedule.
The packet wants contractor registration, a plot plan, the electrical plan, attachment and elevation details, wiring calculations, equipment specifications and a structural letter.
The Town also runs a remote virtual inspection programme for solar, where photographs and video shot to a published specification stand in for a visit.
Its picture list is written for rooftop arrays — roof planes, rafters, roof jack flashing — so we agree with the department which items a ground mount answers before we shoot it.
Outside the Town limits, Texas counties have no general authority to require a building permit for ordinary single-family construction, and Collin County publishes none that reaches a residential array.
Septic setbacks, floodplain rules and your utility's interconnection approval still apply.
We pull whichever applies, and where the Town will take a virtual inspection we shoot it to their spec rather than waiting on a visit.
Fairview is clay, with a silty variant on the north side.
Four points around the Town returned clay at three and silty clay at the fourth — Blackland Prairie, and it behaves like it.
Blackland clay swells when it is wet and shrinks when it is not.
The movement is seasonal and it is uneven, which is what rotates a shallow foundation a few degrees off where it was set.
So the foundation reaches past the zone that moves instead of sitting inside it, and that decision comes out of the soil map for your parcel rather than a town average.
Four points is a sample, not a survey.
On the acre-plus lots around here there is usually more than one workable spot, and the soil is part of choosing between them.
A south-facing array at the thirty degree tilt we build makes about 1,530 kWh a year for every kW installed at Fairview's latitude.
On a 10 kW system that is roughly 15,300 kWh a year.
Yours will differ a little.
Which way your land faces moves it, and anything shading it moves it more than that — the design tool runs your own coordinates rather than a town figure.
What the number is worth is the part that changes by street here, because three utilities pay three different things for the same exported kilowatt hour.
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.
Fairview is HOA country — close to eight in ten houses in these ZIPs were built in 2000 or later, the highest share of the six cities we have measured.
Assume an association applies and check the dedicatory instrument early, because we have not found a Town ordinance capping ground-mount height and the association is usually what binds.
Where a fence line does govern, we build lower tilt or two panels high instead of four so it fits under.
It costs a little production and it is not a dead end.
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
$175 for a residential solar PV permit, on the Town's own published fee schedule.
That is unusual — most cities around here price a solar permit off a general fee table or a project valuation, so you do not know the number until you apply.
In Fairview you do.
Not always.
The Town runs a remote virtual inspection programme for solar — photographs and video shot to a published specification and uploaded to the permit, with a signed certification form.
The published picture list was written for rooftop arrays, so for a ground mount we agree the shot list with the department first.
Where that route is available it takes days off the end of the job.
It matters more than any equipment decision.
On Grayson-Collin lines your export nets at the retail rate.
On CoServ it is bought at 8.5 cents against a retail rate around twelve.
On Oncor lines it is whatever your retail plan says.
Your bill names the company, and we confirm it before quoting because it changes what size array is worth building.
It is a constraint, not a wall.
Texas law stops an association banning solar outright, but it lets one confine a ground mount to a fenced yard and cap it at the fence line.
On the acre-plus lots common around Fairview there is normally a screened spot that satisfies both the association and the sun, and we settle that before anyone pours a foundation.
No salesman. No home visit to get a number.
