House committee hears bill to add consumer disclosures, interconnection rules and new payment methods for rooftop solar

TOPEKA — The Kansas House Energy Committee on March 6 opened a hearing on House Bill 21‑49, a broad rewrite of state rules for distributed energy systems — chiefly rooftop solar, customer-sited storage and the payments and interconnection procedures that govern those systems.

The bill, explained by committee reviser Nick Myers, would require retailers who sell and coordinate financed distributed energy systems to give prospective customers a standalone disclosure document before a financed contract is final. It also would amend parallel generation and net‑metering statutes to clarify interconnection timelines, remove fixed size caps for residential and commercial systems, authorize locational market pricing for one cooperative utility, and increase the statutory purchase-cap the utilities must accept from parallel generation from 4% to 10% of historic peak demand.

Myers said the disclosure form would list system descriptions, guarantees of expected energy production and remedies if those guarantees are not met, the total cost to the customer, details about ownership and transferability of the system and any tax credits or rebates, the installer’s certification or master electrician license, prominent disclosure that the retailer is not affiliated with a utility or government agency, and a clear statement of fees — all in at least 10‑point type and in a customer-requested language. A failure to deliver required disclosures would render the financed contract null and void, he said.

Proponents told the committee the bill addresses a…