Plug-in balcony solar panels can never match the booming rooftop solar movement that state utility regulators derailed.
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California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed SB 868, a bill legalizing residential solar panels for balconies. At a time when the Trump administration is unraveling federal climate progress, California’s so-called “Plug and Play Solar Act” enables homeowners and renters to purchase and plug lightweight solar panels into a regular power outlet and generate up to 1200 watts of electricity. While environmentalists are hailing the bill as a major step toward mitigating climate change, balcony solar is a mere consolation prize in comparison to rooftop solar, which could have made solar power ubiquitous in the nation’s most populous state if it hadn’t been derailed by the state government in order to protect private utilities’ profits.
Joshua Frank, co-author of the new book, Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future, explained in an interview that “for those who have lived in California for over the last 15, 20 years, there was a heyday for rooftop solar.” Frank added: “You could walk anywhere, and someone was trying to tell you, you can buy rooftop solar,” because there was a “big solar boom happening in the state” as a result of public subsidies.
The idea of generating power right where it’s most needed is an ideal solution to help stabilize a warming climate. With the cost of solar panel technology falling dramatically, all that is needed is for governments to incentivize the public to adopt solar power. According to Environment America, that looks like “supportive public policies that make it convenient, fast and affordable to install solar panels,” including rebates and tax credits, and “rules such as ‘net metering’ that assure fair and adequate compensation for the extra solar power that panel owners send to the grid.”
Starting in the mid-2000s, California did just that, doubling down every few years to offer stronger inducements for residents to adopt solar technology. “People were putting rooftop solar with government subsidies on their roofs, and it was fantastic,” said Frank. “We were actually setting the standard of what you can do to combat climate change on the solar level.” As rooftop solar became more popular, there were dreams of a wave of green energy jobs buoying the state’s economy.
But there was one problem that climate justice advocates hadn’t counted on: the falling corporate profits of utilities companies like Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), which were making money from building out the transmission grid rather than selling electricity to consumers. Bernadette Del Chiaro, a senior vice president with the Environmental Working Group in California, said: “These utility companies are essentially construction companies. They make money off of building all of those transmission lines, so they’re constantly pushing to have power plants located really far away from where we all live and work so that we’re dependent on them.”
By 2023, rooftop solar installations in California fell by 80 percent, not because residents were less interested in the technology, but because the state utilities regulators weakened incentives such as the Net Energy Metering (NEM) system that made the technology financially attractive to cash-strapped Californians.
Frank blames Newsom, whose ties to PG&E go back to his years as mayor of San Francisco. The company heavily lobbied Newsom and other influential voices against rooftop solar. The result, according to Frank, was enormous pressure to “essentially gut this rooftop solar program, and at the same time, open up public lands for massive solar development.”
To protect its profits from the booming rooftop solar industry, PG&E claimed that California’s NEM plan was unfair to low-income people of color because it rewarded homeowners who benefitted from rooftop solar while shifting the burden of maintaining the grid to those who couldn’t afford it. “They hired a fancy PR firm,” said Del Chiaro, “and they cooked up this whole story about how rooftop solar was bad for poor people, and it was the reason why electricity rates were going up in California.”
“Our governor and the regulators that he appointed basically just crushed the market in 2022 with a single regulation” ending NEM, she said. “It has yet to rebound.”
Today, instead of solar panels on every rooftop in the sun-drenched state, California is now home to the world’s largest solar farm in the middle of the Mojave Desert, a project that has disrupted delicate ecosystems and that generates widespread complaints of pollution and dust from nearby residents.
“If you took all of PG&E’s wires, all of their transmission and the distribution lines that bring all that electricity into our homes and apartments, and you wrapped them around the circumference of the Earth at the equator, it would go around the Earth five times,” said Del Chiaro. “That’s how big PG&E’s electric grid is.”
She added, in order “to do something as simple as generate an electron” right where it’s needed, using existing technology, “we don’t need all of that infrastructure.” Especially when that infrastructure exacerbates the very issue that renewable energy is meant to fix.
It is widely known that rainforests such as the Amazon are carbon sinks. But, it turns out that deserts like the Mojave are as well. By building a solar farm in the Mojave so massive it can be seen from outer space, Frank said, “we’re actually destroying that ecology, that desert’s ability to sequester carbon.”
“Is this the best we can come up with?” he asked.
Moreover, PG&E’s unwieldy project of transmitting solar power from the middle of the desert to populated areas is increasingly vulnerable to precisely the sort of severe weather that climate change generates. PG&E now wants to spend billions of dollars to bury transmission lines in order to protect them from wildfire damage.
In contrast, the decentralized nature of rooftop and balcony solar makes it more resilient in the face of widespread disruption from extreme weather. A massive storm can take out a single set of transmission lines, leaving entire cities in the dark. But if a few solar panels are damaged, there are likely to be plenty more functioning a few houses away, powering the neighborhood grid.
It is in this context that recent headlines celebrating Newsom’s approval of the balcony solar bill ought to be viewed. California could have had cheap and clean energy via solar panels on rooftops and balconies, and a pristine wild desert. Instead, it got a disruptive solar farm and skyrocketing electricity costs for consumers.
Still, Del Chiaro is hopeful about the potential for residents to offset fossil fuel use via balcony solar panels. “It might just be the simplest version of this technology,” she said. “All you do is you take that solar panel that can be placed anywhere in a small patch of sunlight, and you just plug it into a regular wall outlet in your home or your apartment.”
Most of us are used to drawing power out of an outlet. But, with plug-in solar panels, “the electrons automatically flow backwards through your home, through the walls, and they light up the nearest appliances, and in so doing, reduce your use of the grid-supplied electricity, and they save you money.”
There are numerous caveats to SB 868. Residents will not be compensated for generating more electricity than they use — which is how the now-gutted net metering plan worked. Moreover, they will be restricted to generating a maximum of 1,200 watts — just enough to power a single air conditioning unit.
Del Chiaro explained that it’s “mostly a safety issue,” because “there is a limitation to using just a single outlet as the portal for the electricity to get funneled into your home.” The answer to such safety issues is rooftop solar, which must be professionally installed to protect against potential damage to wires and the grid.
Still, the most attractive aspect of balcony solar is its relative ease of use and portability. Currently priced at anywhere between $500 and $1,500, solar panels designed to clip onto balconies are lightweight and can be transported wherever you live. And, according to Del Chiaro, “because California has now just gotten into the balcony solar game, prices will come down.” She said there are ongoing talks with policy makers to offer low-income residents grants and other subsidies in order to purchase the panels.
Balcony solar panels are widely used across European nations, and the United States has only just begun catching up, with Utah becoming the first state to legalize their use in 2025. More than half of the states in the U.S. are now considering similar bills. But such panels will only ever be able to meet a small portion of the electricity needs of most modern Western homes. Balcony solar should have been a supplement rather than a substitute for rooftop solar in California.
“The sun is our most abundant resource, it’s our most reliable resource,” said Del Chiaro. “And the smartest way to capture the sun’s energy is to do it in a way in which we don’t have to rely on a very fragile and very expensive grid or transmission system.”
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Sonali Kolhatkar is a monthly contributor to Truthout. She is an award winning multimedia journalist and author. She is the host and executive producer of Rising Up With Sonali, a nationally syndicated weekly television and radio program airing on Pacifica stations and Free Speech TV. She was most recently Senior Editor at YES! Media covering race, economy, and democracy, and is currently Senior Correspondent for the Economy for All Project at the Independent Media Institute, and a monthly columnist for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her writings have been published in LA Times, Salon, The Nation, In These Times, Truthdig, and more. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (Seven Stories, 2025), Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023), and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories, 2006). Her first novel, Queen of Aarohi will publish in 2027 by Red Hen Press. Her website is www.SonaliKolhatkar.com.
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