What Kansas law on covenanted solar actually is, now that the bill is gone

There is no Kansas statute limiting an association's power to restrict rooftop solar. That is the whole answer, and it survived the entire 2025-2026 biennium unchanged.

Two things are sometimes mistaken for such a statute and are not. The first is K.S.A. 58-3801 et seq., the solar easement provisions, which govern easements that parties affirmatively create and record for access to sunlight. An easement statute does nothing to a covenant that bans panels outright; there is no easement to enforce.

The second is the Kansas Corporation Commission's net-metering framework at K.S.A. 66-1263 et seq. That decides whether the utility will interconnect a system and how it will be credited. It does not decide whether the owner may install one, and a homeowner who obtains everything the KCC framework offers can still be told no by the architectural committee.

What this means for a Kansas board

Your existing authority is intact, and it is discretionary. That is worth stating plainly to owners who followed the bill and believed the outcome was decided. A board that wants to permit solar may; a board that wants to prohibit it may. The Legislature declined to remove the choice.

A blanket denial is still an exercise of judgment, and Kansas asks something of it. K.S.A. 58-4609 requires directors to exercise “the degree of care and loyalty to the association required of a trustee,” and K.S.A. 58-4608 provides that in enforcement the board “may not be arbitrary or capricious.”⁴ Denying one owner's panels after approving a neighbor's is where that language becomes a problem, and it is a problem that exists whether or not a solar statute is on the books.

If the declaration is silent, there is nothing to enforce. Many Kansas declarations predate residential photovoltaics and say nothing about them. A board relying on a general aesthetics clause or a catch-all architectural approval provision is on materially weaker ground than one relying on an express solar or roof-equipment restriction — and adopting a new rule to fill the gap has to satisfy K.S.A. 58-4617(f), which permits rules affecting residential use only to implement a declaration provision or to address conduct that violates it or harms other owners' use and enjoyment.

What to watch next

Watch Senator Holscher and the 2027 session. Three solar bills have now died in three years, but the sponsor base has not gone away and the proponent testimony is organized. A fourth attempt is the likeliest single outcome.

Watch the drafting, too. SB 144 voided existing covenants outright with no carve-out for condominiums, attached dwellings, or common elements, and that breadth was the specific target of the amendment requests. A narrower successor — prospective only, detached units only, common elements excluded — is a different political proposition, and the 2026 House version of the idea was already drafted that way.