A new deal on balcony solar just dropped in the US

Do you live in the U.S. and want balcony solar? A new initiative could help you get a deal on one of these small but mighty systems that plug into a standard outlet and push clean power into your home.

Today, California-based nonprofit Bright Saver announced it’s selling zero-markup DIY solar kits starting at about $300. The move is intended to kick-start the U.S. market for the tech, which is already cheap and widespread in Germany. Residents in 47 states can now pre-order, with shipping expected in August.

“Only a nonprofit like ours will ever give up our margins completely to pass along to consumers the savings from clean energy,” said Cora Stryker, co-founder of Bright Saver. ​“Someone’s got to do it, or we are up the creek in terms of energy affordability and climate.” The nonprofit has sold balcony solar kits before, but not at cost.

Plug-and-play solar can go in virtually any sunny outdoor spot. That flexibility opens up solar access to the four in 10 U.S. households who can’t, for financial or logistical reasons, put an array on their roof. With every watt generated, the tech lowers household electricity bills and reduces planet-warming emissions.

As spiking energy prices squeeze Americans, balcony solar is becoming wildly popular. Legislatures in more than half of U.S. states have introduced measures to encourage and regulate plug-in solar, and so far eight governors have signed such bills into law. Bright Saver estimates deployed systems number in the thousands nationwide.

But balcony solar in the U.S. has a long way to go to reach the scale seen in Germany. There, plug-in solar installations grew from roughly 40,000 systems in 2017 to as many as 4 million in 2025.

Bright Saver wants the tech to take off faster stateside.

That’s why the nonprofit is selling systems for ​“what it costs us to purchase in bulk from the manufacturers,” Stryker said. She declined to name those manufacturers, noting that the organization is brand-agnostic and could switch at any time.

Bright Saver sells a 180-watt kit for about $285 and a 360-watt kit for $414. To access these prices, you first have to become a member, which costs $29 annually (with renewal optional). Otherwise, a 180-watt kit is $499, and a 360-watt kit is $699.

The organization aims to be the Costco of clean energy; only members can access the deep discounts. And more product deals are coming. Bright Saver plans to offer plug-in home batteries that work with balcony solar kits as soon as next year.

With the membership, the 180-watt kit works out to $1.74 per watt. The 360-watt system, which is just 5% the size of a typical 7,200-watt rooftop array, is significantly better priced at $1.23 per watt.

That’s a good deal in the U.S. Nationally, the average rooftop system costs $2.60 per watt before local and state incentives, largely because of the high ​“soft costs” of marketing, permitting, and installation. Balcony solar kits sold domestically by companies such as Craftstrom, APsystems, and EcoFlow hover around $1.50 to $2.50 per watt, although it’s possible to find systems on sale for less.

But even Bright Saver’s 360-watt-kit price is more than three times what Germans can pay. There, balcony solar through Ikea is a stupefying $0.35 per watt. Clean energy really is cheap energy, especially outside the U.S.

A lower up-front price means a faster payback from energy savings. Bright Saver says that if you live in an area with high electricity rates and your home uses all the power as the panels produce it, its kits would save enough on electricity bills to pay for themselves in as little as 2.5 years.

Bentham Paulos, senior research associate for the national nonprofit Clean Energy States Alliance, calculates that with California’s average electricity price at 32 cents per kilowatt-hour, Bright Saver’s 360-watt kit would save a household in the state about $150 per year; that translates to a payback of about three years. The timeline can stretch from seven to 10 years in places like North Dakota, where electricity rates are lower.

You can run the numbers for your situation with Paulos’ payback calculator. Bright Saver also has a tool, which accounts for potential increases in utility rates.

Households could reap savings for decades. Solar panels and inverters can last 25 to 30 years, quietly producing power from sunlight that falls free on everyone on earth.

“The solar revolution is the great sunny hope of our time,” said Bill McKibben, longtime environmental journalist and co-founder of nonprofit advocacy group Third Act. With plug-in systems, ​“now everyone can participate.”

Bright Saver’s annual membership fee covers some of the nonprofit’s overhead; the group runs mainly on donor funding and says it can keep the discounted sales going for up to six months without more cash. But membership is also a way to rally balcony solar supporters.

“We’re building a constituency,” said Kevin Chou, co-founder of Bright Saver. ​“Joining a movement that’s actually winning is its own kind of power. Every Bright Saver member makes the case for saving money and fighting climate change a little harder for lawmakers to ignore.”

Regulations to ensure the consumer safety of balcony solar are still evolving in the U.S. But Bright Saver states that its kits are safe to use, as the individual components — the panels and inverters — have been certified by a nationally recognized testing laboratory, even though the system as a whole has not. (No system yet has.)

That limitation impacts where the nonprofit sells its kits. Some states are requiring complete-system certification. Bright Saver said it will block shipping to Maine, New York, and Vermont, which have passed bills with that mandate, according to the nonprofit. Other states, like Utah, which in 2025 became the first to legalize balcony solar, require only that the kits’ individual components are certified.

Still, component-level standards have been a concern to some because balcony solar injects power into a home’s wiring. In a worse-case scenario, a portable solar device could overheat a section of a home circuit if other appliances are drawing power from the system at the same time. If the circuit breaker — the safety mechanism — fails to detect what’s going on, then a fire could break out.

But a technical amendment that experts have proposed adding to the National Electrical Code, rules that all states use to safeguard people from electricity hazards, points out that the electrical wires in U.S. homes have some buffer built in. This margin isn’t enough for a larger 1,200-watt balcony solar setup, but it is sufficient to accommodate Bright Saver’s system.

Plugging 360 watts into a typical 15-amp circuit ​“can never damage” the 14-gauge copper wires commonly used, per the amendment’s explanatory notes. While the proposal hasn’t been adopted yet, Stryker expects it will be by September 2028, before the next scheduled update to the code is released.

“We designed our systems to be 360 watts because of what the NEC amendment tells us is safe,” Stryker said.

Balcony solar is still a new technology in the U.S., and not everyone is going to feel comfortable with it yet, Stryker said. But sentiment could shift ​“once we have tens of thousands of these [deployed], demonstrating that there are no house fires, even with the component-level certified systems,” Stryker said.

“And let’s not forget, Utah has had up to 1,200-watt systems in the wild for more than a year now,” she added. ​“We have no major safety incidents.”