In Rooftop Solar Adoption

Small Towns Are Outshining Big Cities

Report By Y-Trendz

A quiet reversal is underway in America's clean energy landscape. For years, the story of rooftop solar in the United States was a story about cities — Los Angeles, San Diego, Honolulu, and other

major metros racking up gigawatts of installed capacity and headlines to match. But a growing body of research and reporting suggests that when it comes to solar adoption relative to population size, it's small towns and rural communities, not big cities, that are quietly pulling ahead.

The Per-Capita Story Nobody Expected

Solar advocates have long tracked which U.S. cities install the most rooftop solar in absolute terms, and unsurprisingly, dense, sunny metros like Los Angeles have dominated those rankings. Los Angeles has consistently led the nation in total installed solar photovoltaic capacity, adding hundreds of megawatts in recent years alone.

But total capacity tells only part of the story. When researchers instead measure solar adoption per person, a different — and often surprising — picture emerges. Smaller cities like Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Fresno, California, have posted some of the highest per-capita solar figures in the country, in some cases outproducing far larger metro areas. Santa Fe, with just 19 megawatts of cumulative solar capacity, achieved a per-person rate exceeded by only a handful of much larger cities nationwide.

That pattern has only deepened as the trend moves further from midsize cities into genuinely small and rural communities. A recent analysis of residential solar adoption patterns found that installations per capita are consistently larger in rural areas than in the densely populated cities and coastal municipalities researchers expected to lead the way — with the most densely populated urban districts actually showing some of the lowest per-capita installation rates in the dataset.

Why Small Towns Are Winning

The reasons behind this shift are more practical than ideological, and they mirror a familiar theme: money talks first.

Lower housing costs, more rooftops, and single-family ownership. Unlike dense cities where a large share of residents rent apartments or live in multi-unit buildings without control over a shared roof, small towns are dominated by single-family, owner-occupied homes. That ownership structure is critical, since decisions about installing solar panels typically rest with the property owner — a much simpler proposition in a town of ranch houses and farmhouses than in a city of high-rise rentals.

Energy costs are a bigger pain point. In rural New England, for example, brutal winters combined with rising health insurance premiums and inflation have pushed small towns to actively hunt for ways to cut costs, with solar emerging as one of the more visible answers. In the Massachusetts town of Warwick, a $170,000 solar installation at the local firehouse was approved by town meeting with little resistance once residents learned it would pay for itself in about six years. Town officials say the effort has helped the community sharply cut oil use and slash winter heating costs over the past decade.

Municipal and state grant programs are filling the gap. Programs like the Massachusetts Green Communities initiative — which has funneled more than $200 million to cities and towns since 2009 — and organizations like Clean Energy New Hampshire, which sends traveling "energy circuit riders" to help rural municipalities navigate electrification, have made it far easier for small towns with limited staff and budgets to pursue solar projects that might otherwise be out of reach.

Rural land and roof space is abundant. In farming communities from Iowa to the Appalachians, families have turned barn roofs and outbuildings into solar arrays, in some cases cutting electricity bills dramatically. That abundance of usable rooftop and outbuilding space — without the shading, structural, or permitting complications common in dense urban blocks — gives small-town and rural homeowners a practical edge.

The Cities Aren't Falling Behind — They're Just Not Ahead the Way You'd Think

To be clear, big cities remain enormous contributors to total U.S. solar capacity, and several — including Honolulu, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. — continue to rank among the national leaders in per-capita solar as well. Multiple annual surveys of America's largest cities have found dozens of them crossing the threshold to be classified as "Solar Stars," cities generating 50 or more watts of solar capacity per resident.

But the broader national data increasingly shows that dense urban environments face structural headwinds that small towns simply don't. A recent Cornell University study found that rooftop solar installations remain heavily concentrated in particular high-income demographics and regions, and that lower-income neighborhoods — many of them urban — have significantly higher potential for carbon offsets from solar but far fewer actual installations, a gap researchers attribute to financing barriers and the high upfront cost of rooftop systems, which can run around $30,000 before incentives.

A Shifting Policy Landscape Adds Urgency

The competition between rural and urban solar adoption is playing out against a turbulent policy backdrop. Nationally, rooftop solar installations are expected to fall to their lowest level since 2020, largely a result of the federal government's decision to eliminate the 30% federal tax credit for residential solar systems that had underpinned much of the market's growth. That change has hit some of the largest state markets hard, even as states like Florida — the country's second-biggest rooftop solar market — are projected to see installations grow sharply this year thanks to abundant sunshine and rising utility costs.

In this more constrained national environment, the towns that have built local funding mechanisms, grant programs, and community buy-in — rather than relying primarily on federal incentives — may be better positioned to keep growing. Warwick's Building and Energy Committee, for instance, financed its solar projects directly through town budgets and state grant programs, insulating its plans somewhat from swings in federal policy.

A New Kind of Solar Boom

None of this means big cities are being eclipsed in absolute solar capacity anytime soon — Los Angeles and San Diego aren't going anywhere as installation leaders. But the per-capita numbers tell a more nuanced story: it's small towns, with their single-family homes, ample roof space, tight-knit town governments, and hyperlocal funding mechanisms, that are proving unexpectedly nimble in the race toward rooftop solar.

As one Massachusetts town energy official put it, the environmental benefits are a lovely bonus — but for most small towns, the real driver is far simpler: the math has to work, and increasingly, in small-town America, it does.