More than half the states in the country allow what’s being called “plug-in solar.” Basically, they’re small-scale solar panels you can put on your balcony or patio and plug in to generate a small amount of energy.
The kits cost a few hundred dollars and, by all accounts, are pretty easy to set up and use. Arizona is not one of those states that allows this; a bill to change that didn’t make it out of committee this year.
The trend started in Utah last year, with a bill sponsored by Rep. Raymond Ward that won bipartisan support. Ward is a state representative in the Utah legislature; he’s served there for more than a decade.
And when The Show spoke with him earlier, they started with what got him interested in this idea.
RAY WARD: Yeah, it’s funny when you’re in the Legislature, I guess every bill, you know, comes from somewhere, right? This bill just came from reading a newspaper article in the New York Times that said you could get these widely in Germany. And I was like, why can’t I not get that here? And it took five or six months to figure out why you couldn’t get it here.
I assumed at first that it was some sort of federal law, but ultimately came to understand that it wasn’t a federal law issue, but it was a combination of our different bureaucracies, not, not all of them government bureaucracies, that just made it so that we couldn’t have them here yet. And then wanted to try and see, that just that’s just dumb that if it works there and it’s been safe there, then there’s got to be a way that we can have it here. And then where you try and figure out where are the obstacles that stop us from having it here, and one of the obstacles turned up to be in Utah state law, so I ran a bill to take away that obstacle.
MARK BRODIE: It seems like there was also an obstacle in terms of getting the utilities on board. Like, how big of a challenge was that?
RAY WARD: Well, in retrospect, you come to understand that you got lucky about something. I visited with the, I mean, I knew the utilities would care about it, of course, they would care about it. And so they’re lobbyists, put me in touch with a couple of their engineers, and talked it through with them and they had some very discrete things that they or focused things that they wanted to have in the bill and they said, look, if you put this and this and this in the bill, then we don’t care about it. But we do feel those need to be in the bill or else we would oppose it.
And those are all ones that made sense. They — it was a these are smaller panels. This is not there’s a — there are different safety issues if you fill your whole roof up with without, you know, having the electrical wiring checked. So, the bill has to be 1.2 kilowatt hours or less. The bill says that you are not asking the utility for any remuneration, and you agree that the utility has no responsibility, which they should, because you just are buying this thing and plugging it in in your own house.
And it says that it needs to have safety standard of some sort that it meets, and my bill, it said that it couldn’t be the need to be approved through a UL standard and not be opposed to anything in the National Electrical Code. And then when the bill had those clarifications in it, they didn’t oppose it. That doesn’t — they didn’t even come testify about it. They just weren’t opposed to it. In many of the other states subsequently that have run the bill, the utilities have come in and tried to shoot the bill down.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, are you surprised at how many other states have tried or successfully implemented something similar to what you did in Utah?
RAY WARD: Not anymore. I mean, we’ve been — this is, you know in the three or four months, a lot’s happens. I mean, this is clear back in 2025 that it happened, right? But — but really, no. I mean, this is such a simple idea. It’s not a weird, bizarre idea. It makes sense that people everywhere would want to be able to, to have this available to them if they wanted.
It is not right that our government and other bureaucracies that are not government but still govern what we have available have refused to take action in a way that makes them not available here when they are safely available other places.
And so, yeah, legislators who also, other places, have interest in making there be broader availability of renewable energy, especially without all the increase costs that come from having for a larger installation to hire a contractor, to have permission from your city, to maybe have to go through a union, to have a contract with your utility. Every one of those things adds additional costs to the costs of just the panel.
So to have a pathway, even though the panels are smaller, that does not have all those costs, that’s an important step.
MARK BRODIE: One of the concerns about a bill to do this in Arizona, the bill went to a committee, they discussed it but didn’t ultimately vote on it, some folks brought up the idea of like, basically, I don’t want to have to look at these. Like, I don’t want my neighbor across the courtyard in the apartment complex to have one of these things that’s staring at me. I wonder if the aesthetic perspective was something that came up during discussion or debate in your legislature.
RAY WARD: Well, I’m sorry to hear that argument carried the day in Arizona. That is the worst of any argument I have ever heard.
MARK BRODIE: I don’t know that necessarily carried the day, but it was one that — I know some utilities had some concerns as well, but this was also an issue that — an issue that some folks had brought up.
RAY WARD: That’s absurd. I, I mean to say, “Well, you know what? I just really can’t tolerate if my neighbor painted their house a certain color, and I need to make sure that they do not have that ability.” This is like the equivalent of a different color of their house.
I mean, would you come in and say, “You know, that model of air conditioner that you have, I think it looks just terrible. I don’t think you should be allowed to buy that model of air conditioner because I don’t like how it looks from across the street?”
MARK BRODIE: Do you have a sense of how prevalent these units have become since this law passed in Utah?
RAY WARD: This is still at the very beginning. So, the barrier that was removed — that, that the law removed here in Utah, was only one of a couple of significant barriers. In Utah law, prior to the bill, said that if you have any solar panel that you plug into the grid, you must have a contract with your utility or else you can’t do that. And that was in state law, so that’s what the bill took away.
But that’s not the biggest barrier to widespread ability to purchase. The biggest barrier is that our main safety standards body here in the United States, not our only one, but by far our main one, is Underwriters Laboratories, and they have been very slow about taking action to get a safety standard, which they’re — I hope that the passage of the bill in Utah, and I hope that the passage of the bill in other places convinces them that they do need to take action because they haven’t made a final safety standard yet.
So, there are people who have purchased them here in Utah. I have a small one on my balcony, but, you can’t go buy one at Walmart or Ikea and you won’t be able to buy one at at a large big-box store until there’s a clear-cut safety standard that UL puts in place and that companies can come in and test to, then you’ll see them pop up all over the place.
MARK BRODIE: How is it worked for you?
RAY WARD: Fine. I plugged it in, and then I haven’t really paid any attention to it since then. If I go and look how much energy it’s producing, it’s producing, oh, one-tenth of my energy. And I — some people really really do like checking how much it’s making and, did they make more this day or that day or how much of their own power are they making? For me, I’m busy doing other things. I got … panels, they hang on my balcony in my backyard. I plugged them in and I have looked at it exactly once since then.
MARK BRODIE: Have you noticed a reduction in your utility bill at all?
RAY WARD: No, because power in Utah is cheap. So, I mean, different — in my mind, everybody should be able to buy these. This should — we need a safety standard so they’re safe, but then whoever wants one should be able to go get one.
If you think about it from the amount of money that a person could save on their bill, that will be much more visible to people who live in states where energy costs are very high because then they’re not having to pay that high amount of money. In Utah, our energy rates are very very cheap compared to most any other place in the nation. There’s other places that are similar to Utah, but we’re at the — at the very cheapest.
My interest is broadly, it was not just personal, “Oh my gosh, if only I could get $7 off my utility bill every month.” But these really should be widely available, both places badly need it where energy is more expensive. All of us should be afraid of our energy costs going up with the things that are changing about our grid, and you just won’t find a, a cheaper way.
I mean, solar has things that it’s not good at, but making energy cheaply and making energy where it’s close by where you need it, so you don’t have to pay for transmission lines that go across three mountain ranges and 40 different property owners and that takes 20 years to get the permissions, can’t beat it on those marks.
I mean, yeah, I guess one way to think of it is, these panels probably make one-tenth as much power as a roof full of panels does over across your whole house. But they do it at one-twentieth of the costs.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Utah state Rep. Ray Ward. Rep. Ward, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
RAY WARD: You’re so welcome.
