Summit Energy Solutions covers Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Oregon in 2026. Ohio and Michigan are not included yet. That is a scope decision, not a judgment that solar cannot work there.
Residential solar advice is not portable across state lines. A page that gets Illinois Smart Solar Billing right can still mislead a Michigan customer under DTE or Consumers Energy rules. A Colorado Xcel payback model can be irrelevant for an Ohio customer served by AEP, FirstEnergy, Duke, or a municipal utility. Net metering, interconnection, incentives, property-tax treatment, REC markets, and complaint paths all change by jurisdiction.
Why scope matters
The residential solar industry has a habit of flattening state rules into national claims. That is how stale federal-credit language survived into 2026 after the Section 25D homeowner credit expired for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. The IRS Residential Clean Energy Credit page and the IRS Public Law 119-21 FAQ are federal sources, but most of the remaining solar math is local.
One state's net-metering policy is not portable. Illinois ComEd customers installing after January 1, 2025 face Smart Solar Billing under ICC-approved Rider POGNM. Wisconsin customers in avoided-cost territories face a different export value. Colorado Xcel customers have a different structure again. Oregon investor-owned utility customers sit under Oregon PUC rules and state-specific incentive programs. The state page is useful only if the tariff underneath it is current.
What Ohio looks like at a high level
Ohio is not a single solar market. AEP Ohio, FirstEnergy utilities, Duke Energy Ohio, Dayton-area utilities, municipal utilities, and rural cooperatives can apply different rate structures and interconnection practices. State-level review runs through the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, but municipal and cooperative customers may need separate local verification.
Ohio also requires a different incentive and REC review than the four current Summit states. Any useful Ohio page would need to verify current net-metering rules, utility-specific interconnection forms, REC availability, property-tax treatment, municipal aggregation issues, and local permitting in the cities being covered. A generic Ohio average would not be enough.
What Michigan looks like at a high level
Michigan has its own structure under the Michigan Public Service Commission, with DTE Energy and Consumers Energy serving large portions of the residential market. Michigan's distributed-generation framework is different from the old retail-net-metering shorthand many national pages still use. Export credit, program caps, interconnection steps, and utility-specific billing treatment need to be checked through the active MPSC and utility filings.
Michigan also has wide variation between Detroit-area, Grand Rapids-area, rural, municipal, and cooperative customers. Snow load, roof pitch, tree cover, and winter production assumptions are not the same as the reference cities in Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, or Oregon. A serious Michigan build would need city-level production and permit data, not a copied Midwest page.
What would need to change
Summit would add Ohio or Michigan only after the underlying research set exists. That means utility tariff verification for the major investor-owned utilities, municipal and cooperative exception handling, REC and incentive research through DSIRE and state program administrators, property-tax treatment review, interconnection workflow notes, city-level permitting data, and reference-city production modeling through NREL PVWatts.
The editorial standard is not whether a state has enough search volume. It is whether a homeowner can leave the page with fewer wrong assumptions than before. If the answer depends on DTE versus Consumers, or AEP versus FirstEnergy, the page has to say that clearly and point to the right verification path.
Why not publish a lighter version first
A thin Ohio or Michigan page would be easy to publish and hard to defend. It would likely say true but generic things: roof direction matters, shade matters, incentives vary, utility rules matter. That does not solve the homeowner's task. It also creates the exact problem Summit exists to avoid, national solar advice that sounds confident while skipping the local rule that controls the math.
Holding scope smaller is less exciting than adding a state map. It is also more honest. The current four-state footprint already spans retail net metering, Smart Solar Billing, avoided-cost export treatment, production incentives, property-tax differences, and state-specific rebate deadlines. That is enough variation to require care.
Bottom line
Ohio and Michigan are not excluded because solar cannot pencil there. They are excluded because useful coverage requires tariff-level and city-level work that has not been completed for those states yet. Until that work exists, Summit's 2026 guidance stays limited to Illinois, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Oregon, where the research base is deep enough to support state-specific advice instead of recycled national claims.