Xcel Energy and solar industry representatives have agreed on a plan to triple the size of the utility’s popular solar panel incentive program.

The agreement between Xcel, Colorado’s largest electricity provider, and the industry comes after the 9.8-megawatt allocation for 2013 was tapped out in April.

Under the plan, outlined in an e-mail to solar installers, Xcel will make up to 33.6 megawatts of solar panel installation rebates for small residential and commercial installations.

The average solar installation for a Colorado home is about 5.5 kilowatts.

Xcel has been slowly cutting back on the size of its SolarRewards program, and under the proposed plan, which must be approved by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, that trend would continue.

Xcel would offer seven tranches of 4.8 megawatts of projects, and with each step the incentive would drop a penny.

Installations owned by homeowners or small businesses in the first tranche would get a rebate of 9 cents for a kilowatt-hour generated.

In the seventh tranche, the rebate would be 3 cents a kilowatt-hour.

For third-party developers, such as leasing companies, the rebate would range from 6 cents to 1 cent.

Between 2006 and 2010, SolarRewards paid nearly $212 million in rebates for more than 7,000 solar-power systems.

But the program created a $32 million deficit, and in 2012 the PUC approved a more limited program with reduced incentives.

Xcel said in its filings at the time that the deficit will be erased by 2017.

Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe