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In the final hours before a deadline to approve or veto legislation expired, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday evening signed into law what’s dubbed the Plug And Play Solar Act.
Senate Bill 868 is designed to pave the way for California consumers and renters to hook up portable installations on places like patios and balconies to help reduce their electricity bills.
“This technology is very important and very powerful and what this bill does is eliminate the massive barrier to people using plug-in solar,” the bill’s author, Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said at a Bay Area news conference Thursday.
The new law will allow consumers to buy small-scale, portable solar panels from retail stores such as Home Depot or Costco without having to fill out paperwork for an interconnection agreement with their local utility.
It applies to devices as large as 1,200 watts and goes into effect Jan. 1 — but that doesn’t necessarily mean all customers can start taking advantage of SB 868 as soon as the beginning of next year.
In that respect, it’s a bit complicated.
To meet the safety requirements of a provision within SB 868, devices must be certified to meet Underwriters Laboratory 3700 standards or an equivalent national testing lab.
But no system on the market meets that standard yet.
“We know that there are at least two very large manufacturers with products currently going through the certification standards process at UL,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California Environmental Working Group, a prime supporter of SB 868. “They expect to pass and have a product certified by the end of this year, which means it’s just a matter of time, a short amount of time, before they have actual things boxed up and the kits for sale to California consumers.”
Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that sells solar kits to customers at low, at-cost prices, said consumers in California will need an electrician to install their portable systems to meet UL’s certification criteria.
If customers want to use a portable system that does not meet certification standards, they must first apply for an interconnection with the utility in their area. In the San Diego service territory, that would be San Diego Gas & Electric.
Stryker thinks the passage of SB 868 will make solar on patios and balconies ubiquitous.
“This is huge,” she said, mentioning the sheer size of the market in California. “We estimate about 70% of Californians can’t get any form of solar … It’s the beginning of democratizing clean energy ownership. It’s not the end of the road, but it’s an absolutely monumental step forward for the whole nation, actually.”
Kits for plug-in solar range in cost from $300 to more than $2,500, depending on size. Each panel connects to a small microinverter, which converts the direct current (DC) electricity from the panels into the alternating current (AC) that homes use.
According to estimates from EnergySage, a company that offers comparison pricing for clean energy products, customers in states like California with high electricity prices who use 600 kilowatt-hours can trim $40 to $50 on their monthly bills, depending on the system they buy.
“SB 868 was, I’ll be honest, a brutal fight with the utilities,” Wiener said.
SDG&E and Pacific Gas & Electric came out against SB 868, as did two groups representing publicly funded power companies — including Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. They cited safety concerns.
“Without appropriate oversight, devices that feed electricity into a building’s electrical system may inadvertently backfeed into the distribution grid,” the California Municipal Utilities Association said. “This creates potential hazards for line workers performing maintenance or responding to outages, who rely on established interconnection standards to ensure circuits are properly isolated and safe to work on.”
To prevent electrical hazards and protect utility workers, the systems under SB 868 must automatically shut off within seconds if the electric grid goes down.
Before the bill headed to the floor of the California Assembly for a vote in August, an amendment was added to SB 868 in August that sunsets the interconnection exemption on Jan. 1, 2030.
That irritated some supporters of the bill, but the Environmental Working Group said in a news release that it still gives “the market four years to take off while giving the Legislature an opportunity to remove the sunset provision” some time in the future.
According to fiscal analysis of SB 868, the new law will cost the California Public Utilities Commission $200,000 to $500,000 each year to fund.
Balcony solar has become very popular in Germany, with more than 4 million small-scale systems installed.
Utah became the first state in the U.S. to make way for plug-in systems when it passed a law in March 2025. With the signing of SB 868, California is now the 10th state to have portable solar laws on the books.
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