What If We Owned Our Own Power?

The Idea in Plain English

Electricity in central Pennsylvania has jumped nearly 30 percent in just three years, and it is not coming back down. PPL charges around 19 cents per kilowatt-hour today. At the current pace, that number will be north of 27 cents inside a decade. Every month you write a check to the utility company, that money leaves the neighborhood and never comes back.

The Piketown Energy Cooperative is a different model. Each participating household installs solar panels and a battery system on their own property. A cooperative corporation owned by the members finances the equipment, manages the network, and sells surplus energy back to the regional power grid. No money leaves the neighborhood. The equipment sits on your land. And after the financing is paid off, your electricity is essentially free for the remaining life of the systems, which is 25 years or more.

Why Would I Pay More Than My Current Electric Bill?

This is the first question any sensible person should ask. Here is the honest answer.

During the first 12 years, your total monthly energy cost through the cooperative is about $388. Your current PPL bill is about $240. That is roughly $148 a month more than you are paying right now. So why on earth would you do this?

1. You are buying a power plant, not renting one.

That $148 is not a fee. It is a payment on $43,500 worth of equipment sitting on your property that you will own outright in 12 years. Your PPL payment buys you nothing. After 12 years of paying PPL, you will have sent them roughly $42,000 and you will own exactly zero.

2. PPL's price is not staying at $240.

Pennsylvania electricity rates have risen about 3.5 percent per year. By year 12, PPL will be charging about $350 a month and your cooperative cost is still $388 and locked. Then your loan ends and your cost drops to zero. Your neighbors keep paying PPL. You do not.

3. Your lights stay on when theirs go out.

PPL outages in rural Pennsylvania can last days. Your battery takes over in 10 milliseconds. Your refrigerator keeps running, your well pump keeps pumping, your heat stays on. Your solar array recharges the battery every day. You can run indefinitely off-grid.

4. Your home is worth more.

Homes with owned solar-plus-storage sell for 4 to 6 percent more than comparable homes. On a $250,000 property, that is $10,000 to $15,000 in added value.

5. You earn money from the grid.

Individual homeowners cannot participate in PJM wholesale energy markets. The cooperative can. When the grid needs extra capacity, our fleet of batteries responds and PJM pays us. That is $500 to $1,000 per household per year in revenue that does not exist for a homeowner acting alone.

How It Works

Each home gets 30 solar panels installed on a ground-mounted racking system, giving you a 12-kilowatt array. That is enough to cover the average Pennsylvania household's full annual electricity consumption. Ground-mounted panels are preferred because they sit at the optimal tilt angle for central PA, they are easier to clear of snow, and they require no modifications to your roof.

Each home also gets a hybrid inverter, two battery modules with 20 kilowatt-hours of total storage, and a smart electrical panel that replaces your existing breaker panel with intelligent circuit-level control. The battery stores solar energy for use at night and keeps your home running during outages. The smart panel lets you monitor and manage every circuit from your phone.

The cooperative ties all member systems into a single virtual power plant. PJM, the regional grid operator, sees our fleet as one coordinated resource. When they need extra capacity, our batteries respond and PJM pays us.

What It Costs

Something Bigger Is Happening in Harrisburg

Pennsylvania's Community Energy Act (HB 504) passed the state House in May 2025 with a bipartisan vote of 114 to 89. The companion bill, SB 504, is in the Senate. If it becomes law, it would create a formal framework for cooperative energy with standardized bill credits and consumer protections. Our cooperative can operate today under existing law, but passage would dramatically expand what we can do.

What This Is and What This Is Not

This is an invitation, not a sales pitch. The next step is a kitchen-table conversation: ten households sitting down to talk about what energy independence means for our street.

Expressing your interest below creates no financial obligation, no contractual commitment, and no liability. You can withdraw at any time by sending an email. We are simply trying to determine whether enough neighbors are interested before we invest time and resources in formal organization.

A detailed financial model with 25-year projections is available for anyone who wants the numbers. And if you want to understand why everything depends on energy, we wrote something about that too.