Virginia appears ready to flip the switch to allow residents to use small solar panels that will provide power to their home or apartment and shrink their electric bills.

Legislation allowing small and portable solar panels installed by tenants passed the Virginia General Assembly last week and Gov. Abigail Spanberger is expected to sign it. The only other place in the U.S. that has such a law is Utah.

“Balcony solar, which is also called plug-in solar, allows any Virginian to go to a store, like Ikea or Walmart, and buy a plug-in solar kit and go home and install it in a matter of hours, powering some of their household’s needs with clean electricity and lowering their monthly energy bill,” Virginia Director for the Chesapeake Climate Action Network Victoria Higgins told WTOP.

If you don’t have a balcony, the kits can be set up in other ways to catch the sun’s rays, such as propping them up in your backyard.

“It’s an opportunity to open up clean energy to so many people who have not had access for a variety of different reasons, whether they are renters, or they just don’t have a suitable roof or they just can’t pay for a full rooftop system,” Higgins said.

Under the plan, Virginians will be able to buy solar kits with a maximum output of 1,200 watts per dwelling starting in January.

State Sen. Scott Surovell, a Democrat representing part of Fairfax County, sponsored the legislation in his chamber and said in a floor speech that the units pay for themselves in two to five years.

Surovell, who serves on the Commerce and Labor Committee, said at a session on March 5 that the use of the small, portable solar panels “pay for themselves within two to five years.”

He noted some amendments to the bill that require a tenant to give a landlord notice of their plan to install a solar panel within “a certain amount of notice,” as well as forming a work group to look into safety and potential building code changes.

“They’re becoming very popular worldwide. And this will put Virginia at the forefront of allowing people to generate their own power, have some individual freedom and liberty, and free themselves from the grips of having to purchase power from ‘the man,’” Surovell said.

The kits are already popular in Europe.

“There are over 1 million registered units in Germany alone that, in the aggregate, are providing one gigawatt of power, which is the equivalent of a nuclear power plant,” Higgins said. “While it’s a small amount of electricity per household, altogether, it can be a meaningful source of clean electricity.”

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