For a few years, Maine had a story it could tell about community solar. By the end of 2025, the state held more community solar capacity per capita than anywhere else in the country, 694 watts per person, built on a six-year run that drew $1 billion in private investment and reached 936 megawatts of installed capacity. Then the legislature moved, and the story got complicated.
In June 2025, Gov. Janet Mills signed LD 1777, removing community solar and other front-of-the-meter projects from eligibility for Maine’s net energy billing program, the mechanism through which solar producers are compensated for electricity sent to the grid. Projects not operational by June 1, 2026, were cut off. The bill imposed new monthly fees on existing installations and reduced compensation for operational arrays by roughly 20 percent. Development contracted by 87 percent, driving a 25 percent decline in the national community solar market in 2025.
Yehuda Gittelson watches these numbers from a different vantage point. He installs residential and commercial rooftop systems for Solaris Energy Solutions in southern Maine, and the distinction embedded in LD 1777 matters directly to his work. Residential rooftop solar was not included in the reforms. Homeowners putting panels on their own roofs remain eligible for net energy billing on the same terms as before. “My phone didn’t stop ringing,” Gittelson said. “If anything, people who were thinking about community solar subscriptions started asking about owning their own system instead.”
That shift is real, though its scale is hard to quantify yet. Community solar had appeal precisely because it let renters, homeowners with poor roof orientation, and customers without upfront capital access access to solar benefits without owning a system. LD 1777 hit developers and large-installation owners hardest. The narrative spillover, the sense that Maine had pulled back from solar broadly, has made some homeowners cautious even where the policy hadn’t touched them.
The net energy billing debate had been building since 2019, when LD 1711 substantially expanded the program. Project size limits rose to 5,000 kilowatts. The number of allowed community solar participants increased from nine to 200. Compensation rates for commercial customers improved enough to cut some payback periods from more than a decade to five or six years. What followed was the community solar expansion that made Maine a national outlier.
Critics argued NEB shifted costs onto ratepayers who didn’t participate, adding roughly $7 per month to the average residential electric bill. Supporters countered that subscribers saved 15 percent on their monthly bills and that the program had delivered clean-energy investment at scale without state subsidies. LD 1777 settled the policy question without resolving the underlying cost-allocation argument. Both sides still think they’re right.
For Gittelson, explaining the difference between what changed and what didn’t has become part of the job. Homeowners who followed the NEB fight often assume their own system’s terms have shifted. “I spend a fair amount of time on calls explaining that nothing happened to residential,” he said. “The coverage made it sound like the whole program was getting cut. For rooftop owners, that’s not what happened.” He paused. “The 20 percent rate reduction for existing arrays is real, though. That one does affect people who have already installed.”
That cut applies to operational systems and lowers the credit homeowners receive for exported power. Someone who sized their array around the prior compensation rate faces a somewhat different return, depending on how much excess power the system produces and how the utility calculates the credit. The change applied to systems already in the ground, which drew pushback from advocacy groups and from installers who’d sold projects based on the old numbers.
Gittelson put three systems in the ground in the months leading up to the bill’s passage. None of his customers had built return calculations specifically around the rate that got cut, but he says the conversations grew longer. People came in with more questions. “You could feel it,” he said. “They’d heard something and weren’t sure what it meant for their project.”
Maine’s residential solar market covers 2.78 percent of homes, placing the state 34th nationally for capacity. The state’s clean energy goals include 100 percent clean retail electricity by 2040, a target that depends on continued residential installation alongside whatever development replaces the community solar pipeline. Some developers are pursuing projects under 1 megawatt, which face no new fees under LD 1777. Others are watching to see what courts and future legislatures do with the broader changes.
“Community solar was bringing capacity online fast,” Gittelson said. “I get why people are worried about what fills that gap. Rooftop is slower. It’s one system at a time.”
The deadline for community solar projects to qualify under the old net energy billing terms is June 1, 2026. After that, the question of what Maine builds next has no clear answer.
