All of it. Nevada, Huxley, Story City, and Ames are our four Story County markets with their own dedicated pages so far, but SolQ installs residential solar throughout the county — Cambridge, Collins, Colo, Gilbert, Kelley, Maxwell, McCallsburg, Roland, Sheldahl, Slater, Zearing, and every unincorporated address in between. This page exists specifically to cover the whole county, not just the four cities with their own page.

If you live anywhere inside Story County’s borders, we almost certainly serve you. We named every incorporated Story County community we could confirm on this page, but unincorporated addresses and rural routes are covered too. Reach out and we’ll confirm coverage, utility, and crediting terms for your specific address before you commit to anything.

Yes — Ames, Story County’s largest city by far and home to Iowa State University, has its own dedicated SolQ page with city-specific pricing, utility, and permitting detail. We’ll confirm your Ames Utilities account and net metering details directly either way.

Yes — Nevada, Huxley, Story City, and Ames each have their own dedicated SolQ page with city-specific pricing, utility, and permitting detail. This county page is the place to start if you’re not sure which city page applies to you, or if you live in one of Story County’s smaller towns.

It depends on where you are. Ames Utilities serves the city of Ames as its own municipal utility, the largest provider countywide by customer count. Alliant Energy serves much of the rural county plus part of Nevada and Huxley. Consumers Energy Cooperative (also called Consumers Energy Iowa), headquartered in Marshalltown, serves part of Nevada and Huxley too. Story City runs its own municipal electric utility. Midland Power Cooperative and State Center Electric each serve smaller pockets elsewhere in the county. We haven’t found a precise published boundary for every smaller community, so for those addresses, and any address near a utility line, we confirm your exact provider before designing your system.

Ames Utilities, the city-owned electric provider for Ames, offers net metering to its solar customers under its own published tariff, distinct from the Inflow/Outflow structure MidAmerican Energy uses elsewhere in Iowa. We confirm the exact current terms with Ames Utilities directly before your system is designed, since municipal tariffs can be updated by the city council.

Alliant credits solar production one of two ways depending on your account: its standard inflow-outflow tariff (Rate IO), which values energy you send to the grid separately from what you use, or a legacy net-metering tariff (Rate NM) for accounts that already had it. Our dedicated Alliant Energy solar page walks through which applies to your Story County account.

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 through 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 within the county. Ames, Nevada, Huxley, Story City, and the smaller towns each run their own permitting process, separate from Story County’s own rules for unincorporated areas. We handle the paperwork with your specific city or the county, and file the interconnection application with your utility, 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 — Ames’ process, for example, moves differently than a smaller town like Colo or Zearing. We give you a realistic timeline for your specific address up front.

Yes — 6 completed residential installs in Nevada and 7 in Huxley, 13 total on record. We don’t yet have a completed install specifically inside Ames or Story City limits, and we say so directly rather than implying otherwise. What backs every Story County project is the same track record behind our 1,179 completed Iowa installs statewide, including 11 completed installs just west in Boone.

Story County sees real central Iowa winter weather, 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.