California’s new building codes will make solar panels the next home appliance
Updated: Jul 6, 2020
On the stroke of midnight this New Year’s Eve, the American dream will get a makeover. In California, the nation’s most populous state, every newly-built home must now come with enough solar panels to satisfy its electricity needs.
It’s a quiet revolution tucked into the building codes approved unanimously by the California Energy Commission (CEC) in 2018. Solar panels are installed on just 20% of new homes in the state. That figure will rise to 100% for every home under four stories tall (with a few exceptions; pdf). The CEC expects this to add 74,000 new solar installations in 2020. By comparison, there were 127,000 residential photovoltaic systems installed in 2017, many on existing homes. Community solar programs approved under the new mandate will add even more.
Generating your own electricity is still a luxury for most homeowners, despite residential solar costs falling 23% over the last five years. Overnight, though, California’s new building codes have turned them into a fixture as standard as a front door. “There are 100,000 customers annually that will see the acquisition of solar as a normal part of their home transaction,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, to Greentech Media. “I can’t overstate how strongly I feel about normalizing the solar experience so it feels less risky to the consumer.”
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