Kansas tightened solar interconnection in July. Your covenant is still the first gate
Kansas tightened solar interconnection in July. Your covenant is still the first gate
2026-09-10 · Kansas · Regulation
Two separate gates stand between a Kansas homeowner and a working rooftop solar array, and only one of them changed this summer. The Kansas Corporation Commission's net-metering framework decides whether the utility will connect the system and how it will be credited. The recorded declaration decides whether the panels may go up at all. They are unconnected, and confusing them is the commonest error in Kansas solar conversations.1
What changed on July 1
Kansas net metering runs on the Net Metering and Easy Connection Act, K.S.A. 66-1263 through 66-1271, adopted in May 2009. For systems installed from July 1, 2026, the Commission states the new limit plainly: “The generating capacity of a customer-generator's renewable energy resource shall not exceed export capacity by more than 50%.”
That is a sizing rule, and it is a meaningful one. It ties the size of the array to what the customer can actually export rather than to a flat kilowatt ceiling. The previous framework allowed customer-generators installing after July 1, 2014 to “export electricity subject to net metering up to 150 kilowatts alternating current,” and before that the residential figure was 25 kilowatts.
The statewide cap is still climbing
Kansas also limits how much net-metered generation a utility must accept in total. Interconnection is offered on a first-come, first-served basis “until the rated generating capacity of all net-metered systems equals 2% of the utilities peak demand in the prior year, until July 1, 2024 at which time it increases by 1% each July until 2027 when it reaches 5% of the utility's historic highest annual peak since 2014.”
Excess generation is credited: “At the end of each billing period, NEG shall be credited to the customer at a rate of at least 100% of the utility's monthly system average cost of energy per kilowatt hour.” The obligation binds the state's two investor-owned utilities, Evergy and Empire District; cooperatives and municipal utilities participate voluntarily.
What none of this does
It does not give any Kansas homeowner a right to install anything. There is no Kansas statute limiting an association's authority over rooftop solar in a covenanted community, and the 2025-2026 Legislature declined twice to create one.
Sequencing, and why it matters to boards
The order in which a Kansas owner encounters these gates is usually backwards, and it produces avoidable conflict. A homeowner signs with an installer, the installer sizes the array and files the interconnection application, and only then does anyone read the declaration. By that point the owner has a contract, a deposit, and a strong sense of grievance.
A board can prevent most of that with one paragraph in the community newsletter: architectural approval first, utility application second. That is not an anti-solar position — it is the same sequencing an association would insist on for a deck.
What the sizing rule changes for an architectural committee
Array sizes may come in smaller, and that helps. A rule tying generating capacity to export capacity tends to produce arrays matched to household consumption rather than maximised for the roof. Committees whose principal objection has been visual mass may find the applications easier to approve than the ones they saw two years ago.
Do not write the utility rule into an association rule. A covenant or architectural standard that references a kilowatt figure or the KCC framework will be wrong within a couple of years — this framework has changed its sizing basis twice since 2014 and its aggregate cap steps annually until 2027. Association standards should regulate what the association can see and is competent to judge: placement, mounting, conduit routing, screening where feasible, and repair obligations on a roof that is a common element.
Handle the common-element roof question explicitly. In a Kansas condominium or townhouse regime where the roof is a common element, the owner is asking to attach equipment to property they do not exclusively own, with maintenance, warranty and water-intrusion consequences that fall on everyone. Both 2026 legislative drafts recognised this: the House version, HB 2669, expressly provided that its rule “shall not apply to the common elements or limited common elements of a common interest community.”2 Even the bill's sponsors did not propose to force panels onto shared roofs.
The document work worth doing now
Adopt a standard rather than deciding case by case. K.S.A. 58-4617(c) permits construction and design criteria “if the declaration so provides,” and requires the association to adopt procedures for approval including “a reasonable time within which the association must act after an application is submitted and the consequences of its failure to act.”3 A committee with no stated turnaround is exposed on delay alone.
Decide the roof-warranty question before the first application. Who pays to remove and reinstall panels when the roof is replaced, and who is responsible for a leak at a penetration, are the two questions that generate litigation. They belong in the approval conditions, in writing, signed.
Check the master policy. Owner-installed equipment attached to a shared building is a coverage conversation, not an assumption.
What to watch next
Watch the aggregate cap reach 5 percent in 2027. Once a utility approaches the ceiling, interconnection stops being automatic and the queue becomes the constraint — a scenario in which an association's approval timeline can cost an owner their place in line. That is a reason to have the turnaround commitment in writing before it matters.
Watch also for a fourth solar bill. The KCC framework has been amended repeatedly; the covenant question has never been legislated at all.
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