Iowa Solar Covenants: Local Subdivision Option, No Statewide Override

Iowa Code chapter 564A, enacted by 1981 Acts, chapter 184, is titled "Access to Solar Energy," and section 564A.1 states its purpose as facilitating the orderly development and use of solar energy by establishing procedures for obtaining access to solar energy. Nothing in the chapter declares a solar restriction void, unenforceable, or contrary to public policy. That single sentence of difference is why Iowa sits outside the group of states with a solar rights act. Section 564A.8 reads in full that city councils and county boards of supervisors "may include in ordinances relating to subdivisions a provision prohibiting deeds for property located in new subdivisions from containing restrictive covenants that include unreasonable restrictions on the use of solar collectors." Three limits are built into that sentence. The power belongs to the city or county, not to the homeowner, so it is exercised only if the local governing body chooses to adopt the clause. It reaches deeds for property in new subdivisions, so it operates at the plat approval stage and not on a subdivision recorded twenty or forty years ago. And it bars only unreasonable restrictions, leaving reasonable placement, screening and appearance conditions intact.

The term the section turns on is defined narrowly. Under section 564A.2(6) a "solar collector" is a device or structural feature of a building that collects solar energy and that is part of a system for the collection, storage, and distribution of solar energy, and the same subsection adds that for purposes of the chapter a greenhouse is a solar collector. Section 564A.2(7) defines solar energy as energy emitted from the sun and collected in the form of heat or light by a solar collector. A rooftop photovoltaic array and a solar thermal system fall inside that definition; a passive feature with no collection, storage and distribution system behind it does not.

The operative remedy in chapter 564A runs against neighboring land, not against covenants. Under section 564A.3 a city council or county board of supervisors may designate a solar access regulatory board, which may be the board of adjustment, the council or board of supervisors itself, or any board with at least three members; where none is designated, the district court where the dominant estate sits acts as that board, and district associate judges may exercise the jurisdiction. Section 564A.4 requires the application to be filed before the collector is installed, with nine specified items including a description of the collector's heights, its orientation with respect to south and its slope from the horizontal, an explanation of how the applicant did everything reasonable, taking cost and efficiency into account, to minimize the impact on the servient estate, and a statement that voluntary negotiation was attempted and failed. Notice is served on the servient owners as an original notice at least twenty days before the hearing, section 564A.4(3) puts the copying and mailing costs on the applicant, and section 564A.4(4) keeps a district court application out of the small claims procedures of chapter 631.

Section 564A.5 sets the standards and the geometry. The board may refuse the easement on a finding that it would require removal of trees providing shade or a windbreak to a residence on the servient estate, and it shall not grant one where the servient owner made a substantial financial commitment at least six months before the filing to build a structure that will shade the collector. The easement reaches only the area within three hundred feet of the center of the collector's northernmost boundary and south of a line drawn east and west tangent to that boundary. Compensation equals the difference between the servient estate's fair market value before and after the easement; the parties are notified within thirty days of the hearing, the dominant owner then has thirty days to deposit the compensation, and may decline to deposit it, in which case no order issues. Once recorded with the county recorder the easement is an easement appurtenant. Section 564A.6 lets the servient owner have it removed if the collector is not operational within two years of recording, goes unused for more than one year, or is destroyed and not replaced within one year. Section 564A.7 also allows a purely voluntary written easement, and section 564A.9 directs the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to publish forms, guidelines and model ordinances, which is the practical place to start when asking a city to adopt the section 564A.8 clause.

Iowa's treatment of covenants elsewhere confirms this is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. When the legislature preempted city and county zoning of home based businesses in 2022, it wrote into Iowa Code sections 414.33(2) and 335.35(2) that the permitted use it created does not supersede a deed restriction, covenant, or agreement restricting the use of land, or a master deed, bylaw, or other document applicable to a common interest ownership community. Iowa legislates around private covenants; it does not override them for solar.

Chapter 564A creates no penalty against an association and no state agency enforces it. A solar restriction in an Iowa declaration is enforced the ordinary way, by the association in district court, and an owner who installs in breach faces the remedies the declaration itself provides. 8 clause, the consequence falls at plat approval: the local body refuses to accept deed language carrying an unreasonable solar restriction in that new subdivision, and an owner who believes a deed violates the adopted ordinance takes it up with the city or county attorney rather than with a state agency.

7(3)(c) allows the parties to write compensation for interference into the easement itself. 6, and the order of removal may require return of the compensation paid, less the servient owner's reasonable expenses in the granting and removal proceedings.