Lee County is the only one of Iowa’s 99 counties with two official county seats: Fort Madison and Keokuk. Fort Madison was the original seat, but a rivalry between the county’s north and south ends led to Keokuk being established as a second, co-equal seat in 1847, and the arrangement has stuck ever since. Each city runs its own courthouse and handles its own share of county business. It’s an unusual structure most homeowners researching Lee County solar options don’t expect, and SolQ serves both seats and everywhere in between.

Yes — all of it. Keokuk and Fort Madison, Lee County’s two county seats, are our most established markets with dedicated SolQ pages and real completed installs, but we install residential solar throughout the county: Montrose, Argyle, Donnellson, and every smaller Lee County community in between. This page exists specifically to tie the whole county together in one place.

If you live anywhere inside Lee County’s borders, we almost certainly serve you. We’ve already completed real installs in Montrose and Argyle, and Keokuk’s own page lists Montrose as a covered area, even though neither has its own dedicated SolQ page yet. Reach out and we’ll confirm coverage, utility, and crediting terms for your specific address before you commit to anything.

Lee County isn’t a one-utility county, and it’s more complicated than most. Alliant Energy is the dominant provider, with an estimated 16,370 Lee County customers per findenergy.com’s utility-territory data. Two smaller Iowa providers also reach parts of the county: Access Energy Cooperative (about 1,830 customers) and the West Point Utility System (about 864 customers). Keokuk itself adds a fourth, out-of-state wrinkle: homes near the Mississippi’s Lock and Dam No. 19 fall under Ameren Missouri instead. We confirm your exact provider before designing your system.

Keokuk sits right at Iowa’s southern edge, and roughly half its residential customers are billed by Alliant Energy while the rest fall under Ameren Missouri — a legacy of the historic Lock and Dam No. 19 hydroelectric plant built there in 1913, still operating today as Ameren Missouri’s Keokuk Energy Center. SolQ’s completed Keokuk installs to date have been almost entirely for Alliant Energy customers; if Ameren Missouri bills your address instead, we walk you through that utility’s current interconnection and crediting terms as part of your proposal.

Alliant credits solar production under its Inflow-Outflow tariff (Rate IO), approved by the Iowa Utilities Commission in late 2020. It tracks power you pull from the grid and power you send back separately, both at your retail rate, up to 110% of your annual usage or 1 MW AC. A small number of older Lee County systems interconnected before December 30, 2020 are grandfathered onto a more favorable 1:1 net-metering pilot. We confirm which tariff applies to your account before sizing anything. Full detail on our dedicated Alliant Energy solar page.

Both are real, smaller providers within Lee County’s borders. Access Energy Cooperative is a member-owned rural electric co-op headquartered in Mount Pleasant, serving an estimated 1,830 Lee County accounts with its own interconnection rules, separate from Alliant’s tariffs. The West Point Utility System is a small municipal electric utility serving the town of West Point itself, with roughly 864 customers. If either serves your address, we confirm current terms directly rather than assuming Alliant’s rules apply.

No. Iowa’s state income-tax credit for residential solar isn’t available for systems installed after 2021. Two state benefits still apply regardless: a 5-year property-tax exemption on the added home value from your system, and a sales-tax exemption on qualifying solar equipment (labor is still taxable).

If you’re buying your system outright through cash or a loan, the federal Residential Clean Energy Credit (Section 25D) ended for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025, under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July 2025. If you go with a Lease or PPA instead, the benefit is still built in indirectly: our financing partner owns the system and claims a separate federal credit for commercial-owned solar (Section 48E, active for projects that begin construction by July 4, 2026, or are placed in service by December 31, 2027), which is part of how they can offer $0-down payments below what you’re currently paying your utility. We’ll walk you through exactly what applies to you during your free consultation.

Yes, and they vary by municipality. Fort Madison and Keokuk each run their own permitting process, separate from Lee County’s own rules for unincorporated areas and smaller towns like Montrose, Argyle, and Donnellson. We handle the paperwork with your specific city or the county, and file the interconnection application with the correct utility, Alliant Energy, Ameren Missouri, Access Energy Cooperative, or the West Point Utility System, so you don’t have to sort out which office to call.

Many projects are installed in as soon as 30 days. Some take longer, up to 2-3 months, depending on your municipality’s permitting timeline and your utility’s interconnection queue — Keokuk’s Alliant/Ameren Missouri split in particular can add a step to confirm which utility applies before we file. We give you a realistic timeline for your specific address up front.

Yes. Our completed project records show 20 verified residential installs across the county: 10 in Keokuk (4.9–12.6 kW, 7.9 kW median), 4 in Fort Madison (8.5–15.8 kW, 12.6 kW median), 3 in Montrose, and 3 in Argyle — roughly 211 kW of installed capacity combined. Lee County is a newer, smaller proof market for us than Cedar Rapids or Dubuque, and we say so directly rather than oversell it.

Lee County is Iowa’s southeasternmost county, the only one that borders both Illinois and Missouri, near the point where the Mississippi and Des Moines Rivers meet close to a genuine three-state corner. It’s also home to the lowest elevation point in the entire state of Iowa, on the Mississippi River at Keokuk. That river-corner geography is part of why Keokuk itself ended up split between two different states’ electric utilities.

Lee County sees real winter weather like the rest of southeast Iowa, and panels are engineered for that seasonal range: steep-mount racking sheds snow faster than a roof’s own pitch, and panels typically clear themselves within a day or two of a storm as they warm in the sun. Production dips in December and January and climbs sharply in spring and summer, which your system design accounts for from the start.