Balcony solar is sweeping the US , but who’s actually selling it?

A hands-on form of solar power has electrified the U.S. in the past year. Plug-in solar lets anyone hang a few panels in the sunlight and send the power straight into their wall sockets to partially offset their utility bill. It extends the benefits of clean energy, a little bit at a time, to renters and anyone else who hasn’t been able to access traditional rooftop solar.

This do-it-yourself energy production has operated in a regulatory gray area, though some intrepid customers have experimented with it anyway. But voters are demanding action to lower their soaring energy bills, and state leaders have responded with a wave of legislation to carve out explicit allowances for plugging solar panels into home outlets.

Last year, the Republican-controlled legislature in Utah became the first to legalize plug-in solar. In just the last few months, 10 more states passed plug-in solar laws, and several more are still considering bills.

The plug-in phenomenon originally took off in Germany as ​“balcony solar” in the late 2010s, and it accelerated when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 spiked energy prices in Europe. German households had installed more than 4 million systems as of 2025, by some estimates, though only 1 million were officially registered.

But eager U.S. customers are not able to use the exact products sold across the Atlantic.

“We unfortunately can’t take one of those systems from Germany and bring them here and plug it into the wall, because we just have a different electrical system,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver, a nonprofit that seeks to expand balcony solar access.

The business ecosystem is racing to catch up to this surge of consumer interest. But vendors looking to stake a claim in the U.S. market need to grapple with state-by-state rules and a shifting regulatory landscape. The venerable safety lab UL Solutions only started testing full plug-in systems in January, and no complete setup has officially cleared its certification yet. The National Electric Code is undergoing a multiyear update that could make plug-in more accessible — when the 2029 edition takes effect.

Given the swirling uncertainties, established rooftop solar providers are hanging back, for now at least, but a handful of new players are already selling to an eager public.

The German balcony solar veterans

The only companies with direct experience navigating the plug-in solar market got that head start in other countries.

“The goal is to get those big German manufacturers here [in the U.S.] selling their systems, competing against each other, and lowering prices to the consumer,” Stryker said. ​“That will happen. It’s a question of how fast that will happen.”

CraftStrom launched in Germany in 2019. Its product fits naturally with how most people live in cities, said CEO and co-founder Stephan Scherer: German urbanites typically rent compact apartments that have balconies and that don’t use a ton of energy. They thus have the physical setup for hanging a few panels, and the opportunity to generate enough power to make an appreciable dent in their monthly consumption.

To make its panels easier for people to install, CraftStrom decreased the weight by replacing the typical glass and aluminum framing with special laminations to protect the silicon cells. The company has already gone through three iterations of microinverters and eight iterations of solar panels.

“The good thing about the German market was that we got to play around, test, improve in time for the U.S. market to start,” Scherer said.

CraftStrom has been selling thousands of systems across all 50 states for several years, Scherer said. But it had to change the equipment to match the design parameters of the U.S. grid, and then navigate safety standards that are evolving in real time.

CraftStrom, for instance, built its U.S. products around language in the National Electric Code that allows larger plug-in systems, provided that customers get an electrician to wire them into a dedicated circuit on the breaker box. For regular circuits, customers can buy a CraftStrom power meter that throttles solar production, depending on what else is on the circuit, to stay within National Electric Code stipulations.

These adaptations to U.S. rules add cost and complexity, as opposed to the truly plug-and-play German experience. The country’s plug-in market remains in the early-adopter phase before exponential growth kicks in, Scherer said.