How it failed, and what the rest of the bill was about

The record: prefiled April 4, 2025; referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources and Environment; “Reported with amendments (12-0)” on April 23, 2025; engrossed April 24; returned to the calendar April 29; notice given May 8. Then, on May 13, 2025: “Read third time by title, amended, roll called on final passage, yeas 46, nays 53. Failed to pass.” The Final Disposition table records it as VOTE – FINAL PASSAGE/HOUSE.

The solar-rights amendment was Section 1 of a seventeen-page instrument. The remainder created a new Chapter 12 of Subtitle I of Title 30 — R.S. 30:1121 through 1127 and 1141 — regulating utility-scale solar power generation facilities: setbacks from “nonparticipating residential property,” decommissioning security, and permits from the Department of Energy and Natural Resources. Only Section 1 touched R.S. 9:1255.

So the vote that killed the amendment was not a vote about homeowners associations. It was a vote about solar farms, and the association-facing change went down with it. That is a common way for a small statutory change to fail, and it is a reason not to read the 46–53 tally as a legislative view on HOA solar restrictions.

Nothing else was filed, in either session

We ran full-text searches of both the 2025 and 2026 Regular Sessions for “9:1255” and for “solar collector.” HB 615 is the only instrument either search returns. No pro-homeowner solar bill was filed in Louisiana in either year.

The two 2025–2026 acts that do mention renewables are utility-scale and irrelevant to an association: Act 279 of 2025 “[p]rovides for renewable energy regulation and permitting,” and Act 658 of 2026 “[r]equires recycling of decommissioned renewable energy infrastructure.” Neither creates any rooftop right against an association.³

Where state solar policy actually operates — and where it does not

There is a real Louisiana solar regime, and it is worth being precise about what it governs, because it is routinely misdescribed as protecting owners against associations.

The Public Service Commission's substantive distributed-generation rules date from its General Order of September 19, 2019 in Docket R-33929. What changes annually is the credit each utility must pay for exported energy. The Commission's own 2026 Avoided Cost Rates document states the rule:

“Pursuant to the Commission's General Order dated September 19, 2019 ('Distributed Generation Rules'), customers who submit an interconnection request and/or install a distributed generation facility after December 31, 2019 shall pay the full retail rate for all energy purchased from the utility, shall pay a zero rate for all energy self-generated and consumed, and shall be credited at Avoided Cost for the energy sold back to the utility.”

“Avoided Cost shall be calculated as the 12-month average Locational Marginal Price for each jurisdictional electric utility. The Avoided Cost Rate will be updated annually by each electric utility in their annual filing pursuant to the Distributed Generation Rules…”

The 2026 rates run from “$0.03583 per kWh” (Northeast Louisiana Power Cooperative, effective January 1, 2026) to “$0.03990 per kwh” (Pointe Coupee Electric Membership Corporation, same date), with Entergy Louisiana at “$0.0386407 per kWh Effective April 1, 2026” and Cleco Power at “$0.03854 per kWh Effective March 1, 2026.”

That is what the PSC decides: what the utility pays an owner. It says nothing about what an association may restrict. Across all twenty issues of the Louisiana Register in the January 2025 to August 2026 window, “net metering” appears zero times — the Commission does not publish through the Register — and the Commission's September 16, 2026 business session agenda carries no solar, net-metering, community-solar, distributed-generation or interconnection item.⁴

What that leaves an owner with

The declaration, and two sections of the Planned Community Act. R.S. 9:1141.14(C) governs whether the association may tighten a restriction and by what vote — more than eighty percent of the whole association for a use restriction, two-thirds of those present for tougher construction, design and aesthetic standards, subject to the no-forced-retrofit rule and the forty-percent-of-value trigger. And R.S. 9:1141.37(F) supplies the standard for a rule: “Every rule adopted pursuant to this Section is required to be reasonable.”

The word “unreasonably” in R.S. 9:1255(B) has not been construed by a Louisiana appellate court in the association context. We are not going to guess how it comes out on any given roof.

What to watch next

Nothing filed, nothing pending. The 2027 Regular Session convenes April 12, 2027 and is a fiscal session, which puts a solar-rights amendment inside the five-slot non-fiscal prefiling exception. Note also that the Public Service Commission closed Docket R-36131 — its rulemaking on jurisdiction over methods of providing electricity to electric vehicles — so there is no pending Commission proceeding on the EV side either.