Bills on Plug-in Solar and "Single Plant" Rule Pass Despite Misinformation (Updated)

A busy last week on energy issues at the statehouse also featured a veto of the sustainable data centers bill.

Updated June 5, 2026

Clarification: This article has been updated to include the higher rates paid to owners of certain older net-metering systems for excess power and to reflect the PUC’s latest updates to the solar net-metering rates, passed on May 29. More detail and the perspective of an electricity law expert have been added to several other areas of the discussion of H. 710.

Before we get to the main article, there’s news on H. 727, the “Vermont Sustainable Data Centers Act”—Gov. Scott vetoed it last Thursday. You can read the Governor’s veto message here and my coverage of the legislation here and here. An override vote in the House fell 7 votes short.

Two bills making it easier to install new solar energy generation in Vermont have now passed out of both houses of the state legislature and await the Governor’s signature or veto. I’ve previously written about each bill, but each has changed slightly since then. This post profiles the bills in their final (or close to final) form, as well as the Senate floor debate on one of them. As always, nothing in here is legal advice.

Plug-in Solar

Let’s start with the bill I’ve written about the most (at least in number of posts) this session, S. 202, also known as the “balcony solar” bill. This act creates a legal framework for Vermonters to purchase and install up to 1200 watts of plug-in solar panels, without seeking approval from their electric utility or the state, as they would need to for traditional rooftop or ground-mounted solar.

The bill has now passed both houses. Most of the provisions remain functionally the same as they were back in late January, when I covered the bill in depth. Additionally, the provision requiring all plug-in solar devices, regardless of their grid export capabilities, to have a smart (and more expensive) inverter made it in the final bill.

The one new feature, which was the subject of some back and forth between the two houses, is that the final version does functionally allow landlords to block tenants from installing one of these systems—although that is not very clear from the final language.

The provision in question is below with the key language that, according to the bill’s lead sponsor, gives a landlord an effective veto, in bold:

A tenant shall provide at least 10 days’ notice to the landlord of the tenant’s intent to install a plug-in photovoltaic device in compliance with subsection (a) of this section in the building. The landlord shall respond within 10 days with any reasonable restrictions on the installation of the device, including requiring the tenant to pay for any required electrical work and hiring a licensed electrician to do the work. If the landlord does not respond within 10 days, the tenant may proceed with installation. A tenant shall not perform or hire someone to perform electrical work on the premises for the installation of a plug-in photovoltaic device without the landlord’s permission. A landlord shall not be compelled to perform or pay for electrical work on the premises to allow for the installation of a plug-in photovoltaic device.

At first it seems like this provision is very tilted in favor of a tenant being able to install one of these systems. It has what lawyers call a “deemed approval” provision that allows a tenant to proceed with installation if a landlord does not respond to their request within 10 days. And it doesn’t clearly give the landlord the option of denying that request, saying only that they must respond with “reasonable restrictions.”

But the catch is that bit about not performing or hiring someone to perform electrical work on the premises. As we’ve discussed, UL 3700—the technical standard from Underwriters Laboratories that this act requires systems to meet—requires plug-in solar devices to have a unique type of plug and “receptacle” (socket)—as well as a new type of dedicated wall outlet. Both that receptacle and the wall outlet it forms a part of would need to be installed, which Sen. Anne Watson, the bill’s lead sponsor, agreed would likely constitute “electrical work on the premises.” UL 3700 also requires these devices to be installed on either a dedicated circuit of the household’s wiring, or, if on a shared circuit, in a particular configuration with other devices—which, again, would arguably require an electrician to at the very least assess the household wiring, if not install a new circuit—again, electrical work.

Senator Watson, who shepherded the bill from introduction in the committee she chairs to its final passage, confirmed that interpretation. “The tenant…should not have the right to, say, rewire the house …to have one of these plug-in solar devices. And so to the extent that it requires rewiring, the landlord can say no,” she said.

She added that if UL 3700 changes those requirements, at that point the present language would not allow a landlord to block a tenant’s installation. “Should the technology advance such that… it truly is something that you can just bring home and plug in, there’s no provision there for the landlord to say no at that point.”

(That this bill passed the same week that a larger bill about landlord-tenant relations failed to clear the final hurdle is simply an interesting coincidence).

As we’ve covered repeatedly, Underwriter Laboratories, and by extension, Vermont, which requires systems installed here to meet their certification, have taken a conservative approach to ensure safety of these systems (already popular in Europe) with American household wiring and the grid. By prioritizing safety, that approach does mean that some of the rosiest projections about the impact this technology might have—either on household finances or the energy transition—are unlikely to come to pass in the near term. This potential for landlords to restrict renters’ use of the panels just the latest example. But that certainly does not mean the technology, once enabled—and the standards themselves—won’t advance and ultimately fulfill those projections. Rooftop solar is an apt comparison for how that has occurred over time.

Single-plant rule

H. 710, which passed last Thursday after a hasty conference committee to iron out some final details, amends the so-called “single plant rule” for purposes of the state’s various programs that incentivize distributed, smaller-scale renewable energy. Given both economics and restrictive state regulations on other renewables, the most obvious impacts of this change will likely be on where new solar projects are sited.

To recap, the bill replaces an old multi-part test for when two generating facilities located on the same or adjacent parcels of land would be considered one “plant.” That definition matters because there’s a maximum “plant” size for projects to qualify for various state incentives, including the above-market prices net-metering projects receive (see below) or the slight premium that projects can conceivably charge for being eligible for Tier II of the Renewable Energy Standard, through which utilities are required to source a certain amount of energy from distributed, in-state generation below 5 MW.

Critics—including the Public Utility Commission (PUC), which had to apply it—called the existing test subjective and unworkable, with renewable energy advocates pointing to cases where it thwarted a solar installation from going in on one parcel, simply because a separate installation already existed on a neighboring parcel. (Locating on adjacent parcels can create significant cost savings from use of shared roads and other infrastructure, those advocates say).

For more on the new test and what would be allowed, see our earlier post.

The actual single plant rule has not substantively changed since that prior coverage. Instead, several related provisions got tacked onto the bill.

The first new provision creates a new decommissioning fund in the state’s coffers. Energy generation projects (of any type) larger than 500 kW and constructed after 2017 are already required to plan for and provide a financial guarantee of decommissioning under state regulations; but this fund could be used to pay for decommissioning in the event the owner of a project cannot be determined or simply refuses to do the work. It passed without controversy. If the law passes, the PUC will establish the formula to determine how much each project must pay into the decommissioning fund.

The second new section directs the Vermont Department of Public Service (DPS) to study what impacts, if any, solar energy generation has had on primary agricultural soils in Vermont.

Senator Anne Watson (D – Washington County), chair of Senate Natural Resources and Energy, introduced this section as a “substitute to an amendment” on the Senate floor—in other words, she proposed it as a replacement for a different amendment that had been offered by Senator Russ Ingalls (R – Essex County).

Sen. Ingalls proposed requiring each proposed solar project sited on primary agriculture soils to undergo a “full-spectrum audit” by a “licensed professional engineering firm” of “energy payback time and carbon dioxide emissions at the cost of the applicant” as part of the permitting process.

Several large-scale studies of solar projects around the world have examined whether emissions associated with manufacturing solar panels and/or clearing trees to build solar farms approach the emissions that such projects displace from a similar amount of fossil-fuel based electric generation and concluded that they do not come anywhere close.

In presenting her substitute amendment, Sen. Watson said that she appreciated the concern that the development of solar projects may be having some impact on the stock of primary agricultural soils—a category in state law of land deemed especially productive for farming. There are not good existing aggregate data on what this impact is or is projected to be. Watson’s substitute amendment asks DPS and the Agency of Agriculture, Farms and Markets to report back by next January on a series of questions designed to explore the extent of the impact. There was some back and forth over the scope of those questions, but the resulting bill has now passed both houses.

Confusion on the Senate Floor

In the floor debate on these amendments, Sen. Ingalls said of solar projects, “And when they sell the power they’re one of the few people that actually tell people what we’re gonna pay. We’re getting—we’re gonna have to pay 21, 22 cents per kilowatt hour, when we can buy power elsewhere for 6, 7, 8 cents.” Asked to clarify this comparison by another senator, Ingalls said, “Solar on the open market is 21 to 22 cents per kilowatt hour, and as far as on the open market, as far as natural gas out of the Midwest, we’re looking at 7, 8 cents a kilowatt hour. That is the knowledge I am familiar with and I am very comfortable with those numbers.”

When I asked where he sourced the figure for the cost of solar electricity from, Ingalls said, “Everywhere, everywhere you look, it’s every contract.”

It appears from my research that this figure of 21 to 22 cents per kilowatt hour was likely a reference to the price received in the form of on-bill credits in recent years for the most expensive, older arrays in the net-metering program, although Ingalls would not confirm he was thinking of net-metering projects when asked.

Net metering is a state program to incentivize individual home and business owners to install small to medium-sized renewable energy arrays on their properties. The program covers several types of renewable energy, but photovoltaic (PV) solar is far and away the most popular. Array owners offset their own electricity use with the power generated by these arrays and receive compensation for any leftover power in the form of credits off their future bills.

Excess energy from net-metering arrays is not bought and sold “on the open market”—utilities must buy it from their participating customers as long as there’s sufficient local distribution capacity, at rates established according to statute and regulation that also vary a bit from utility to utility.

The PUC sets and approves these rates every two years, with the most recent update released last Friday.

Even as the rate paid to new systems has fallen over time through each successive PUC update (until last week’s, under which compensation for excess generation it will rise from about 14 cents to about 16 cents for the most expensive systems), it has risen for older systems through a complicated formula.

Net-metering systems built pre-2017, when the program received a substantial overhaul, and small systems (under 150 kw) built on rooftops or other “preferred sites” from 2017-2021, who chose to transfer their Renewable Energy Credits to utilities, have received overall compensation for excess power in recent years of roughly 20-22 cents per kilowatt hour, and will again see a slight increase under the recent update.

While it is inaccurate to label this as the single price for solar energy in the state, or to suggest that future solar projects—those which could be impacted by the statutory changes under discussion when this figure was mentioned—will receive this price for their energy absent further changes to the net metering rates, it is a number that many Vermonters may be familiar with, due to the large number of older net-metering systems still producing power.

In a recent filing with the Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Public Service called net metering “the highest-cost program to deploy distributed renewable energy in Vermont.”

Electricity experts questioned whether these rooftop or small ground-mounted net-metering projects formed an apt comparison to utility-scale power generation, be it renewable or gas-powered. “There’s cheaper ways to get solar other than net-metered solar,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program. “Typically large-scale installations are cheaper than net-metered.”

That is certainly true in Vermont. In a list of all power purchase agreements (PPAs) longer than 5 years signed in 2025 by Vermont utilities for power from in-state solar facilities (all smaller than 5 MW), prices ranged from 8-11 cents per kilowatt hour, including both the energy and the associated renewable energy attributes. Most contracts were fixed at this price over the lifetime of the project, according to Jonathan Dowd, Deputy Director of Renewable Energy Vermont (REV), although a couple included annual increases. (This list was provided to me by REV, a trade association for renewable energy developers and companies in the state, and I verified those numbers).

Similarly, in 2022, the last year for which such data are available from the Department of Public Service, the price that solar projects participating in the state’s “standard offer program” for facilities under 2.2 MW received through a competitive auction was 8-12 cents per kilowatt hour.

That is actually on the high end for new utility-scale solar, even in New England, where panels can’t produce as much power as in the sunnier West/Southwest. According to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a federally-funded research center, utility-scale solar energy projects that came online in the ISO-New England region in 2024 had an average PPA price of about $51/MwH—or 5 cents per kilowatt hour. (LBNL defines utility-scale as projects larger than 5 MW. This figure is extrapolated from a chart on page 11 of the document).

The cost differential between net-metered projects and utility-scale projects does expose a tension between building solar on the places where there appears to be widespread agreement that it would be preferable to build it—on rooftops, landfills, over parking lots, etc.—and building it at the scale and in the locations that will offer the lowest retail electric price, which could have some impact on agricultural or forest lands.

The other part of the comparison—to power produced from natural gas in the Midwest—did not make sense to either electricity experts or some other Senators.

“It’s not a great comparison, I think, but I can see why it’s tempting to compare the two, but I don’t really know that it holds up,” said Peskoe.

“You cannot buy power from the Midwest,” said Senator Andrew Perchlik (P/D – Washington County) from the Senate floor. “You can buy environmental attributes, you can buy carbon credits, you cannot actually buy power and use it for your regulatory proceedings here in Vermont.”

According to the experts I spoke with and my own research, electric power would need to flow through multiple capacity-constrained transmission bottlenecks between regional grids—from PJM to NYISO and from NYISO to Vermont’s region, ISO-NE—and pay multiple sets of transmission charges to get to Vermont from the closest part of the Midwest. This makes it at the very least technically and financially impracticable to sign long-term contracts for such power under current grid constraints. These three regional grid operators are exploring the idea of cooperatively planning and building more transmission lines to connect them and make power flow more feasible, but that would likely take years and cost billions of dollars.

Sen. Perchlik, through a line of questioning, didn’t quite do certain other aspects of the bill and its implications justice. Perchlik repeatedly questioned Senator Steven Heffernan’s assertion that H. 710 would make it easier to build more solar next to existing solar on agricultural land; Heffernan ultimately admitted that this was his interpretation of the bill. It is an interpretation, but it is a plausible one and one shared by renewable energy advocates.

When I asked Peter Sterling, executive director of Renewable Energy Vermont, which supported the bill, about this very point, he said, “What H. 710 does is it clarifies the criteria the PUC will use that allows solar to be co-located. So when you clarify that criteria, the developer knows, the state knows, everyone knows [whether a proposed project will receive a permit].” Sterling acknowledged that REV itself has described the law as making it “easier” to co-locate solar on any land, agricultural or otherwise. So, to be transparent, have I).

These bills are still awaiting the signature or veto of Governor Scott.