All of it. Creston is our most established Union County market and the only city large enough for its own dedicated page, but SolQ installs residential solar throughout the county — Afton, Lorimor, Cromwell, Arispe, Shannon City, Thayer, and every smaller Union County community in between. This page exists specifically to cover the whole county, not just the county seat.

If you live anywhere inside Union County’s borders, we almost certainly serve you. We named every incorporated Union 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 — Creston has its own dedicated SolQ page with city-specific pricing, utility, and permitting detail. This county page is the place to start if you live anywhere else in Union County, or if you’re not sure which page applies to you.

It depends on where you are. Alliant Energy is by far the largest provider, serving Creston at 100% plus Lorimor, Shannon City, Cromwell, Thayer, and most of Arispe. Afton runs its own municipal electric utility for roughly 98% of the town. Rural pockets of the county are served in smaller part by Farmers Electric Cooperative Iowa, Southwest Iowa Rural Electric Cooperative, and Clarke Electric Cooperative. We confirm your exact provider before designing your system.

Alliant Energy (Interstate Power and Light) bills solar customers under its Inflow-Outflow tariff, approved by the Iowa Utilities Commission in late 2020. The meter tracks two separate flows every 15 minutes: inflow (power you pull from the grid, billed at the standard retail rate) and outflow (power your system sends back, credited at that same retail rate), with full retail-rate crediting up to 110% of your annual usage or 1 MW AC, whichever is smaller. Credits carry forward within an annual cycle (January–April reset) but any balance left at year-end is forfeited. If you interconnected before December 30, 2020, you may still be on Alliant’s more favorable legacy 1:1 net-metering pilot, grandfathered for up to 25 years.

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).

For homeowners who own their system outright, through cash or a loan, no. 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 can claim a separate federal credit for commercial-owned solar (Section 48E), available for projects that either 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. SolQ walks through exactly what applies to your situation, ownership vs. lease, during your free consultation.

Yes, and they vary by municipality. Creston runs its own permitting process, separate from Union County’s own rules for unincorporated areas and the county’s smaller incorporated towns. 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 — Afton’s municipal review process, for example, moves differently than Alliant Energy’s process in Creston. We give you a realistic timeline for your specific address up front.

Yes, in Creston — 4 completed residential installs on record, ranging 6.5–13.3 kW. We don’t yet have a completed install specifically in Afton or any of the county’s smaller towns, and we say so directly rather than implying otherwise. What backs every Union County project is the same track record behind our 1,179 completed Iowa installs statewide, including dense clusters in Cedar Rapids and Dubuque.

Panel angle and mounting are designed for snow to shed naturally, and production typically rebounds quickly after storms as panels clear. Systems here are engineered for southwest Iowa’s real seasonal range, not best-case-only conditions.

Mostly no. Afton runs its own separate municipal electric utility, covering roughly 98% of the town, with only a small remaining slice on Alliant Energy. It’s a genuinely different provider with its own crediting terms, which we confirm directly with the city before designing a system for an Afton address.

Yes. SolQ offers the same cash, loan, and $0-down Lease/PPA options everywhere in Union County, whether you’re in Creston, Afton, or a smaller town like Lorimor or Cromwell. What changes by address is which utility credits your production and which municipality handles your permit — not which financing options are on the table.