A bill to make solar power more accessible to renters and others who face barriers to the alternative energy source stalled in the Illinois Senate, but it’s likely to return in the fall veto session because lawmakers like the idea of helping residents with their electric bills.
Plug-in solar, also known as balcony solar, allows people to install small solar panel systems that can be plugged into normal wall outlets for personal use. Instead of a rooftop, the panels could be set up on a balcony, in a yard, or on a porch or patio.
“I think lawmakers really see this as an opportunity to give folks a way to have more control over their power bills. I think also, frankly, people just think this is cool,” Kavi Chintam, campaign manager for Illinois at Vote Solar, told Capitol News Illinois.
Rooftop solar has been increasingly adopted in Illinois, with more than 130,000 households choosing to install panels as of 2025. Chintam said plug-in solar is a great opportunity to expand access to the technology.
“The rooftop solar industry in Illinois has been so successful and has actively helped people lower their energy bills,” she said. “The group that is left out of that, of course, are renters and folks that don't have access to their roofs.”
The biggest roadblocks to passing the bill in Illinois were concerns about safety, and further negotiations will revolve around specific language regarding that issue.
Lawmakers wanted to observe how other states handled the issue first, Sen. Rachel Ventura, D-Joliet, said in an interview. She sponsored the Senate version of the bill, which stalled in April.
Utah was the first state to adopt the technology, and Ventura said Illinois legislators were relying on that bill as a model for Illinois’ version. Now that eight other states have passed bills to allow plug-in solar, she said Illinois has a better framework to work with.
Addressing safety concerns
“Everyone loves the concept,” Ventura told Capitol News Illinois. “That's the good news about this, is that nobody is opposing the concept. It really comes down to making sure the safety is there for everyone, and we want to make sure the language addresses everyone's safety concerns.”
The safety question boils down to two main areas: safety for people who work on the electric lines and safety for residents.
Ventura said a big concern for utilities and labor unions was making sure the energy generated by small plug-in solar systems can’t travel back to the grid during a power outage — a phenomenon called backfeeding. The danger would come from a lineworker touching a line they believe is depowered.
In the original bill language, there was a carveout for low-wattage plug-in solar systems, between 400-1,200W, that would have allowed people to connect certified systems with little oversight.
Advocates for the bill argued that low-wattage systems didn’t need to meet national code requirements or have special permissions because they generate less energy than many home appliances use.
“The smaller systems are able to just immediately be plugged in by people without needing landlord permission or any changes to wiring, because these are so small,” Chintam said. “They would still need to be certified and would still need to have safety precautions like preventing backfeeding and having an automatic shut off.”
Without the carveout, Chintam said, residents would likely have to wait for national rules to change and they wouldn’t be able to benefit from their safety-certified solar systems until 2029 at the earliest.
The carveout was a sticking point for lawmakers, labor and utilities. More than 30 other states have considered plug-in solar bills, and the carveout language was treated differently in each one.
“So we decided to hold our bill to see how those other states’ come about,” Ventura said. “We are now researching what language moved, what language didn't move, and trying to create model legislation that we will file or amend in veto session.”
Safety testing & European use
UL Solutions, a branch of a larger historical organization that tests and certifies the safety of new products, established a framework for testing, standardizing and certifying plug-in solar systems for safety. Those standards were new this spring and are still being developed, so lawmakers didn’t know at the time how they would apply to the language Illinois used.
As for the safety of the systems within the home, advocates point out that plug-in solar uses the same technology rooftop solar does, but on a smaller scale. They also gesture toward countries like Germany, where plug-in solar panels are abundant and people haven’t reported problems.
The systems are widespread in Europe, with 25 countries having legalized them. The European electric system and how much voltage its outlets are designed to handle is slightly different from America’s, so there’s a minor conversion to make.
“This is where the example of what has happened in Europe is very relevant,” Nathan Phelps, the managing director of Vote Solar Regulatory Advocacy Hub, told Capitol News Illinois. “So at their level of 800W that can be plugged in, they have, last I checked, no examples of safety issues at that level. And so doing that conversion to the US, that's 392W (that can be plugged in).”
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, an organization in the Southeast that promotes clean energy, released a report last week examining the safety of plug-in solar compared to commonly used diesel-powered generators, and found that plug-in solar systems perform better.
“Safety concerns have come up in various states and more or less the states that have passed the plug-in solar bills have determined that the safety concern is not significant enough in order to prohibit plug-in solar,” Phelps said.
The future looks bright
Ventura said plug-in solar will likely be revisited in the fall because lawmakers are excited about expanding solar to more people.
“The chair was willing to hear the bill, even in the end, when there was a little bit of disagreement on whether we have a carveout or not,” she said. “The chair was still willing to hear the bill, and he was surprised that I was saying ‘let's wait.’”
All of the stakeholders have been to the table to discuss the broad strokes of the bill, so the only remaining conversations will deal with specifics.
“We're excited that other states have passed this legislation and given us the road map to getting it passed here in Illinois,” she said.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
This article first appeared on Capitol News Illinois and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
