Maine legalised balcony solar — and left associations out of the statute
Maine legalised balcony solar — and left associations out of the statute
2026-09-12 · Maine · Legislation
What happened. On 6 April 2026 Governor Mills approved LD 1730, An Act to Make Small Plug-in Solar Generation Devices Accessible for All Maine Residents, as Public Law 2025, chapter 644. It creates 35-A M.R.S. § 3475 and makes Maine one of the few states to authorise plug-in — “balcony” — solar devices of up to 1,200 watts.1
For anyone living in a Maine condominium, the important thing about this statute is what it does not contain. There is no clause voiding a declaration or bylaw that blocks one of these devices. The statute constrains utilities, not associations.
What the law actually does
Section 3475 is an interconnection statute. It sits in Title 35-A, the public-utilities title, and it bars a transmission and distribution utility from imposing certain requirements on a customer who plugs in a small solar generation device. The aim is to remove the interconnection-application burden that makes a $500 device uneconomic.
A plug-in device is not a rooftop array. It is a panel or two, typically mounted on a balcony rail, a wall or a patio, feeding a standard outlet through an inverter, with a cap here of 1,200 watts.
And what it deliberately leaves alone
Subsection 8 puts the point beyond argument: the installer must comply with any restrictions imposed by the owner of a structure the installer does not own. In a Maine condominium the balcony rail, the exterior wall and the patio slab are very often common element or limited common element — not the unit.
So the statute's permission runs to the utility relationship, and the declaration still governs whether the device may be attached to the building at all. Compare that with the EV-charging statute enacted the year before, 33 M.R.S. § 576-A, which states that a declaration provision prohibiting or unreasonably restricting a charger “is void and unenforceable.” The Legislature knows how to write that sentence. It did not write it here.
The open question: does Maine's older solar-rights statute reach these devices?
This is the genuinely unresolved part, and it deserves to be stated as unresolved rather than answered.
Maine has had a solar-rights protection for years. For instruments adopted after 30 September 2009, a provision prohibiting the installation or use of a solar energy device is unenforceable — the cutoff sits at 33 M.R.S. § 1423. Whether a 1,200-watt plug-in unit is a “solar energy device” within that protection is an interpretive question that chapter 644 does not address and no Maine court has decided.
Two structural facts bear on it. The 2009 protection is date-limited — a declaration recorded before 30 September 2009 is untouched by it, and a great many Maine condominiums predate that date. And even where the protection applies, it has never been read to authorise attaching equipment to another party's structure; that is the point subsection 8 of the new statute makes explicit.
The result is a three-way split, stated accurately:
- EV charging — an express statutory override of the declaration, effective 1 January 2026, with deadlines and fee-shifting (§ 576-A)
- Low-impact landscaping — its own override at 33 M.R.S. § 1451, created by P.L. 2023, c. 376
- Plug-in solar — no override at all; the utility is constrained, the association is not
Maine has built its carve-outs one statute and one clock at a time: solar in 2009, landscaping in 2023, EV charging in 2026. Plug-in solar did not get one.
What a Maine board can do before the first request arrives
They will arrive, because the economics now work and the interconnection obstacle is gone.
- Decide the ownership question first. Is the mounting surface unit, limited common element, or common element? That determines whether this is an owner's decision, a licence question, or an alteration of common property.
- Check your recording date against 30 September 2009. If the instrument predates it, the § 1423 protection does not reach your declaration at all, whatever view one takes of plug-in devices.
- Write a rule rather than improvising a refusal. Weight and wind loading on a rail, electrical load on a shared circuit, disconnection during exterior work, who removes it, and what happens on resale are all ordinary architectural-review matters. A rule aimed at those is defensible; a blanket aesthetic ban on a device the Legislature has just encouraged is the kind of position that invites a test case.
- Talk to the insurer. Equipment on a balcony over a walkway is a liability question independent of the energy question.
- Do not assume § 576-A's machinery applies. The 30-day acknowledgment, the 60-day deemed approval and the prevailing-party fee award are EV-charging provisions. None of them is in chapter 644.
On the effective date, with a caveat
Chapter 644 carries no emergency preamble in the enacted text, so it takes effect under Maine's ordinary rule: 90 days after the recess of the session, under the Maine Constitution, Article IV, Part Third, § 16. The 132nd Legislature's Second Regular Session adjourned sine die on 29 April 2026, which puts the default date at 29 July 2026.
Some secondary write-ups give 15 July 2026 instead. We have not found an official statement of an effective date tied to this chapter's own text, so treat 29 July 2026 as the computed default and verify against the Revisor's published date before relying on it for a deadline.
What to watch next
Three things. Whether the Public Utilities Commission opens implementing work on § 3475. Whether any Maine court is asked to decide if a plug-in device falls inside the § 1423 solar protection. And whether a 2027 bill adds the override that chapter 644 omits — a question the Commission to Study the Need to Codify or Recodify Laws Regarding Residential Community Ownership Associations, reporting by 1 December 2026, is positioned to raise. This column is not predicting any of the three.
Related Maine HOA Topics
- LD 1730, An Act to Make Small Plug-in Solar Generation Devices Accessible for All Maine Residents — bill status and enacted text, P.L. 2025, c. 644 (approved 6 April 2026) ↩
- 33 M.R.S. § 576-A, Electric vehicle charging stations allowed — the express declaration override, for contrast ↩
- Constitution of Maine, Article IV, Part Third, § 16 (90-day effective-date rule) ↩
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