Changelog — Plug-In Solar Legality Tracker

Dated history of changes to our 50-state plug-in solar legality tracker and its open dataset — state law signings and data updates, newest first.

Tracker last verified: September 11, 2026 (New Jersey and California; New York was last reviewed 1 August 2026 and the other 48 states earlier — see each record’s last_reviewed). L = law / legislative event · D = dataset / site update.

2026

• September 11, 2026 — D Correction: two numbers that had quietly gone out of date. Our UL-listing page said in six places that four of the eight certification requirements were in force — twice with the word “today” and once with “this morning”, neither carrying a date. Colorado’s requirement commenced on 12 August 2026, ten days after that page was last checked, so the number is five. The page had been contradicting itself: the Colorado commencement date was already printed in the list further down it. All six now read five, a dated correction records the change, and the product readings keep their own separate date — they were not rechecked. Found by our pre-deploy date report, not by a reader. Separately, the home page listed California under “Bill pending — one chamber”. SB 868 passed both chambers and was enrolled and presented to the Governor on 31 August 2026; the row now reads “Bill pending — with the Governor”. It is still not law, and the California page badge is unchanged.
• September 11, 2026 — D Correction: our own count of signed states was stale in six places. After publishing the New Jersey signing we measured the claim across the whole site rather than across the twelve files we had just edited. Six live statements still said eight states, or seven: the counter on the home page and the status chip above it, two on the New York page — including a heading saying New York would be the ninth to sign, which the New Jersey signing had made the tenth, while the same page already said “becomes the 10th” four paragraphs below — the advertising page, and the developer page, which still said seven and had not moved since before New Hampshire. All six now say nine. A different number is deliberately unchanged: eight states write NRTL certification into their statutes, and New Jersey becomes the ninth only when the Act takes effect on 1 March 2027 — those pages now say exactly that rather than a bare nine. Also corrected on the New Jersey page: “Updated:” and dateModified read 1 September, the signing date, while the file itself was written on the 11th; the standby template carried the signing date into three separate fields and our first pass caught only one of them. The New York page, edited today, moves to 11 September in the same three fields.
• September 11, 2026 — L New Jersey signed the Garden State Balcony Solar Act — the 9th state. Governor Mikie Sherrill signed S2368/A4836 on 1 September 2026. Its provisions take effect 1 March 2027, six months after enactment; until then New Jersey stays under ordinary utility interconnection rules, and our pages say so rather than calling it legal today. The act exempts a “portable solar generation device” of not more than 1,200 W from interconnection agreements and from net metering, bars the utility from demanding approval, a fee or extra equipment, stops landlords, homeowners’ associations and municipalities from prohibiting it, and requires 14 days’ written notice from a tenant. Read from the bill text (third reprint) and the Governor’s press release on 11 September 2026. Signed count is now 9 (CO, ME, MD, UT, VA, CT, VT, NH, NJ); New York is still with Governor Hochul.
• September 11, 2026 — D Correction: vote figures for S2368/A4836 withdrawn, and the act’s name fixed in our standby material. Our pages and dataset carried “passed both chambers unanimously (Senate 40-0, Assembly 79-0)”. Two of our own files disagreed on the Assembly figure — one said 79-0, the other 79-0-1 — and we have not opened the official roll call. The claim is withdrawn from every page and data file pending verification; the dated entries below are left exactly as they were written. Separately, the standby page prepared in July still called it the “Garden State Plug-In Solar Act” — a name we had already corrected against the bill text on 25 August. Section 1 of the act reads “Garden State Balcony Solar Act”. A draft written before a correction does not inherit it.
• September 11, 2026 — D California SB 868 is with the Governor. The bill was enrolled on 28 August 2026 and, in the official record’s own words, “enrolled and presented to the Governor at 6 p.m.” on 31 August 2026. It is still not law. We state no signing deadline and no effective date, because we have verified neither from a primary source. Read from leginfo.legislature.ca.gov on 11 September 2026.
• September 4, 2026 — D Correction: the tracker line was one day ahead of the data. The page said the tracker was last updated August 26, 2026, in four places. The newest last_reviewed in the dataset is August 25, 2026 — California, and only California. A day is small, but the line is a freshness claim and it was not measured from anything. All four now read August 25, and the guard that checks them was rewritten to compare against the dataset instead of against this changelog, which had started to move for reasons that have nothing to do with the data.
• September 4, 2026 — D Correction: the privacy policy named an analytics provider we no longer use. It said page-view statistics were collected via Vercel Web Analytics. That script was removed from the site earlier, but the policy was not updated with it. Checked on September 4, 2026: no analytics script loads on our pages. The privacy policy now says so.
• August 26, 2026 — L California SB 868 moved, and it carries a sunset nobody reported. The bill was placed on the Assembly Appropriations suspense file on 5 August, reported out “Do pass as amended” by 11-0 on 17 August with Assembly Rule 63 suspended, amended again on 17 and 18 August, and read a third time and amended on 20 August 2026. It is now on third reading and is still not law. The current text ends with a sunset clause we quote in full on the state page: “This section shall remain in effect only until January 1, 2030, and as of that date is repealed.” None of the secondary coverage we read mentions it. We have not found an express operative date in the text, so we do not say when it would take effect. Also corrected: Illinois SB 3104 had three further procedural actions on 2 July 2026 under Senate Rule 3-9(b) that our note omitted; the last substantive action remains 22 May. Verified against leginfo.legislature.ca.gov and ilga.gov on 25 August 2026.
• August 23, 2026 — Three state bills that had been unreadable are now on the pages, each checked against the legislature’s own status page rather than secondary coverage. Michigan HB 5764: introduced 19 March 2026 with 15 sponsors from both parties, referred to the House Energy Committee, last action 14 April, still in committee. Ohio HB 755: in the House Energy Committee with “Reported By Committee” not reached — secondary coverage placing it in the Senate is not supported by the official tracker. Illinois SB 3104: passed committee 9–4 and a second reading, third-reading deadline extended three times, re-referred to Assignments under Senate Rule 3-9(a) on 22 May 2026; its amended text sets a 391 W line and prohibits anything above it until the NFPA adopts an NEC standard. None of the three is law. Dataset, per-state JSON and last-reviewed dates updated.
• August 19, 2026 — L Washington, D.C. added as the 51st jurisdiction. B26-0602, the Guiding Renewable Interconnection and Distribution (GRID) Amendment Act of 2026, is under Council review after a public hearing on 26 March 2026. As introduced it would exempt a portable solar generation device from interconnection and net-metering requirements, and it sets no power cap - no wattage limit appears in the provision. It is not law. Badge: Bill pending. Verified against lims.dccouncil.gov on 19 August 2026.
• August 18, 2026 — L Massachusetts and Pennsylvania added to bill tracking. Both were recorded here as having no legislation. Both have a bill.

  Massachusetts: H.5175 passed the House 128 to 27 on 26 February 2026. The Senate struck the text, substituted its own version and passed that 32 to 8 on 1 July. The House declined the Senate version on 16 July and a conference committee was appointed the same day. The Legislature’s own full text search returns the Senate engrossed text, Senate No. 3166, as the only document in this session containing the phrase “plug-in solar”, so the provision sits in the version the House has not accepted. We have not read the section itself and quote no wattage limit. Not law.

  Pennsylvania: House Bill 1971 was referred to the House Energy Committee on 28 October 2025 and has not moved since. No votes, no committee meetings. Not law.

  The omission was ours. We were checking the states we already knew were moving, and not looking for the states that had started.

• August 4, 2026 — D The eight states that require NRTL certification no longer recommend equipment that does not have it. Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Utah, Vermont and Virginia each carried the same starter-kit block: an AUECOOR 600W kit whose listing declares only “Certification: CE”, and a Y&H 600W microinverter whose own seller states “The inverter is not UL1741 certified.” Neither claim was false — we never said they were certified — but naming an uncertified kit as TOP PICK on a page that explains the certification law is not defensible. Those eight now open with the statute verbatim and its commencement date, then what meets it: the Hoymiles HiFlow Pro (UL 3700 and UL 1741, $152.78, pre-order, warehouse arrival early September) and the APsystems EZ1 ($325, sold direct by the manufacturer). Neither manufacturer runs a programme that pays publishers, so there are no tracking links in that block and it says so. Price and channel now live in a dataset with the date they were read, not in the pages. The other 42 states keep their existing products, where no state certification requirement applies, and gain one paragraph distinguishing a grid-tie kit from a power station before the first product. Corrected the same day: the first version of that block said the EZ1 was “available now”. We had checked its price and its certification, never its stock or lead time, and printing that beside a pre-order line made it a comparison we could not support. The pages now say we have not checked.
• August 3, 2026 — L Vermont is the eighth state with a certification requirement, not the seventh. Act 149 (S.202) was signed by Gov. Phil Scott on 16 June 2026 and took effect 1 July. Read from the legislature’s own Act 149 As Enacted: the certification sits inside the definition at 30 V.S.A. §201(9)(C) — a device must comply with UL 3700 or an equivalent NRTL certification and operate to IEEE 1547-2018. A device that does not is not a “plug-in photovoltaic device” under the Act at all, so it never reaches the §256 exemption. Vermont is one of only three states that names a standard outright. Sec. 2 also requires that devices “shall only be connected to systems using smart meters”, which nothing of ours had recorded. Our UL listing page said seven states and three in force; it now says eight and four, and carries a dated correction note because it had already been sent to journalists. D Three pages gave three different accounts of where the EcoFlow STREAM is sold. Corrected against EcoFlow’s own US product page: the STREAM Ultra is restricted to Utah under H.B. 340, and that page states the restriction twice in wordings that do not cover the same act — one restricts sale and installation, the other only installation. Both are quoted; neither is resolved. Also corrected: the claim that neither Anker nor EcoFlow sells balcony storage in the US, which was true of the specific products named and false as a generalisation.
• August 2, 2026 — L Maine: the 420 W split is real and now cited. 35-A MRSA §3475(3) allows up to 420 watts of combined inverter output, measured in AC, to be installed by the customer; above that a licensed electrician is required. L New Hampshire re-read from the chaptered text rather than from what we already held: Chapter 262 at 262:7 II says the remainder takes effect 1 January 2027. D New page — what UL listing means, and why almost nothing has it. Seven states had written NRTL certification into statute — Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Utah and Virginia — with the verbatim wording of each, and eight popular products checked against what their own listings declare. One has an NRTL listing to a UL standard and is not sold on Amazon; two state plainly that they do not have one; two say nothing at all; one carries a European mark. The certification_requirement field was added to those seven records with the provision, the quote, the effective date and the source.
• August 1, 2026 — L California SB 868 recorded for the first time (Legislative Information) — the “Plug and Play Solar Act” passed the Senate 35-1 and sits in Assembly Appropriations, last action 29 June 2026 (July 1 hearing postponed). 1,200 W cap. Our dataset previously showed no legislation at all for California. D New Jersey: the statutory short title is the “Garden State Balcony Solar Act”, not “Plug-In Solar Act” as trade coverage and this site had it — corrected against the bill text. Still awaiting Gov. Sherrill; her bill-action releases of 30 June and 7 July do not include it. D New York: source link moved to the Assembly action history, because the nysenate.gov page for the base bill still reads “In Senate Committee” and appeared to contradict us; the active version S8512C was substituted by A9111C and passed both chambers on 28 May (we had 29 May). Statutory short title: “Solar Up Now NY Act”. Review scope: only these three states were re-checked against primary sources today. The other 47 keep their earlier review date rather than being marked as reviewed.
• July 8, 2026 — L New Hampshire SB 540 signed by Gov. Kelly Ayotte on July 2, 2026 (Governor’s press release, part of a 74-bill signing) — NH is the 8th state to sign. One plug-in solar generation system per metered customer, max 1,200W AC inverter output, NRTL-certified; no utility approval, interconnection paperwork, or fees. Per the adopted text, main provisions take effect January 1, 2027 (the building-code section is contingent on certification of a national standard). Note: some secondary sources cited a ~July 27, 2026 effective date — the adopted text says January 1, 2027. Also: New Jersey’s Garden State Plug-In Solar Act (S2368/A4836) passed both chambers unanimously June 30, 2026 (Senate 40-0, Assembly 79-0) and awaits Gov. Sherrill — NJ status updated to passed/awaiting. Signed count now 8 (CO, ME, MD, UT, VA, CT, VT, NH); awaiting: NY, NJ.
• July 2, 2026 — L Correction: Vermont S.202 was signed by Gov. Phil Scott on June 16, 2026 (Governor’s office) — our June 22 entry listed it as passed/awaiting, which was already out of date. Vermont is the 7th state to sign; plug-in provisions (1,200W per meter) effective July 1, 2026. Signed-into-law count now 7 (CO, ME, MD, UT, VA, CT, VT). Re-verified same day: NH SB 540 still enrolled/awaiting (LegiScan), NY SUNNY Act still awaiting Gov. Hochul.
• June 22, 2026 — L Correction: New Hampshire SB 540 is enrolled/awaiting the Governor (LegiScan), not signed — status updated signed→awaiting; signed-into-law count corrected to 6 (CO, ME, MD, UT, VA, CT). Vermont S.202 added as passed/awaiting. (Corrected July 2, 2026: S.202 had in fact been signed on June 16 — see the July 2 entry.)
• June 21, 2026 — L New York SUNNY Act (A.9111C / S.8512C) re-verified — still passed both chambers and awaiting Gov. Hochul's signature; if signed, NY becomes the 7th U.S. state (6 have signed to date).
• June 15, 2026 — D Tracker review: signed-state list and labels checked; New Hampshire (SB 540) page published; Connecticut confirmed as a signed state. (Count later corrected June 22, 2026 — New Hampshire was enrolled/awaiting, not signed; the signed total is 6. See top.)
• June 14, 2026 — D Published the structured 50-state dataset (plug-in-solar-laws.json), per-state JSON files, the developer docs and a Dataset schema; added per-state review dates.
• June 4, 2026 — L Connecticut signed HB 5340 (omnibus solar bill) — 6th U.S. state; plug-in / balcony solar provisions effective Oct 1, 2026 (1,200W cap).
• May 29, 2026 — L New York SUNNY Act (A.9111C / S.8512C) passed both legislative chambers; awaiting Gov. Hochul's signature.
• May 28, 2026 — L New Hampshire SB 540 was originally logged here as enacted — corrected June 22, 2026: this was inaccurate. SB 540 was enrolled June 17, 2026 and is awaiting Gov. Ayotte; it has not been enacted. 1,200W cap; would take effect ~July 27, 2026 if signed. See the June 22 entry.
• May 12, 2026 — L Maryland signed HB 1532 (Utility RELIEF Act); emergency clause = effective immediately on signing; 1,200W cap.
• May 7, 2026 — L Colorado signed HB26-1007 — highest U.S. cap at 1,920W; effective Jan 1, 2027.
• April 22, 2026 — L Virginia signed HB 395 / SB 250; effective July 1, 2026; localities cannot ban balcony solar within the cap.
• April 6, 2026 — L Maine signed LD 1730; effective July 15, 2026 (up to 420W self-install, up to 1,200W with a licensed electrician).

2025

• March 2025 — L Utah signed HB 340 — the first U.S. state to fully legalize plug-in solar; effective May 7, 2025 (treated as appliances, no interconnection agreement within the cap).

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