FARMINGTON — Deep into the Green Efforts Committee's September 9 meeting, somewhere past the slides on emissions per resident and a long detour over whether nuclear power counts as clean, a resident asked the question people actually take home with them.
Should I wait on a battery? Until 2027, or after?
"That's a good question," came the answer. "Probably, yeah."
It was an honest answer. The deadline underneath it had been repealed three months earlier, and nobody in that room had any particular reason to know. It happened in June, in a forty-page act, on a Thursday.
The clock that got moved
Connecticut pays you for what your roof makes through a program called Residential Renewable Energy Solutions. You enroll, the utility pays a fixed rate for every kilowatt-hour, and the rate holds for the life of the agreement. It is the least glamorous part of putting up panels and the part that decides whether they were worth it.
The program opened in 2022 and was written to last six years. The statute named 2027 as the sixth and final year, in those words. That is why everyone says 2027.
Public Act 26-127, signed June 4, took the sentence out.
What replaced it is a bridge. The utilities keep offering the current program until the end of 2028, or until its successor is running, whichever comes first. The successor has its own schedule: regulators owe a decision by December 1, 2027, and the new rates take effect January 1, 2028.
That is a handoff, not a cliff, with eleven months of slack behind it if the regulators need the room. There may be good reasons to put panels up this fall. Beating a deadline is no longer one of them.
What you would actually be signing
The rate has not been set. Nearly everything around it has.
An agreement can run twenty years. Your system has to be sized so that across a year it does not make more electricity than your house uses, which rules out building a small power plant over the garage and selling the difference. The ceiling is twenty-five kilowatts per dwelling unit, a distinction that only matters if you own a two-family.
Then you choose, once, between two arrangements. The utility can buy everything your panels make, while you go on buying everything the house burns at the ordinary price. Or the house can take what it needs as the power arrives, and the utility buys what is left.
The law also tells regulators to write separate rates for lower-income customers and for qualifying multifamily buildings, instead of folding them into a single residential number.
The battery question
The expectation in the room was that the new program will favor home batteries, on the logic that power you make and use on your own premises never enters the grid and never picks up what the grid charges for the trip.
The law leans that way without committing to it. Regulators are told to examine incentives for battery storage and to weigh them against rebates a household may already collect. Examine is the operative word. What a battery will be worth under the new program is not a number anyone can look up, because nobody has written it.
Batteries have already become ordinary here. Farmington permits home storage about the way it permits an air-conditioning condenser, no special setback, and staff told the committee they have signed off on several around town.
So, now or later
That belongs to a homeowner and an installer. It turns on the pitch of a roof, the rate on offer, and a tax situation that is nobody else's.
But the part that was worrying the person who asked has an answer, and it is a dull one, which is usually the sign of a good answer. The deadline moved. The program runs on. The next one is already on the calendar for the first of January, 2028, and there is nothing in between to race. 🏛️
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road, the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air, which is their way of saying temperature and humidity are held at museum conditions. Solar panels are warrantied about as long as a mortgage. Very little else a person owns is built to that standard, which is more or less the entire business model of a storage unit. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington long enough to be suspicious of any deadline everyone agrees on. He is on his second coffee and has read the public act so you do not have to. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the Wednesday night committee meeting, the state law that quietly changes what your roof is worth, the question your neighbor is also wondering about and has not asked out loud. We publish slowly and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we mean it. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰