Vermont Covenants Cannot Block Solar, Only Steer It Within 45 Degrees of South

Vermont's solar protection is a covenant-voiding statute, not a permit scheme and not an easement statute. Section 544 was added by 2009, No. 45, § 15d, effective May 27, 2009, and it sits in Title 27, chapter 5, among the rules on conveyance of real estate. It operates on the instrument rather than on the association: a deed restriction, covenant, or similar binding agreement running with the land is simply void to the extent it prohibits, or has the effect of prohibiting, solar collectors from being installed on buildings erected on the covered lots or parcels. Because it works that way, it does not carry the coverage limits that keep much of the Uniform Common Interest Ownership Act away from older communities. It reaches a 1978 subdivision covenant and a 2024 condominium declaration on the same terms.

The second sentence of subsection (a) is the one that decides most disputes. It says a property owner may not be denied permission to install solar collectors by any entity granted the power or right in a deed restriction, covenant, or similar binding agreement to approve, forbid, control, or direct alteration of property with respect to residential dwellings. That language is aimed squarely at architectural review committees, design boards, and the approval clauses that Vermont declarations routinely give a board. The committee may still exist and may still receive your application. It may not use that application to refuse the array.

The third sentence is the association's only affirmative power under this section, and it is drawn tightly. For purposes of subsection (a), the reviewing entity may determine the specific location where solar collectors may be installed on the roof, within an orientation to the south or within 45 degrees east or west of due south. That describes a 90 degree window of roof planes centred on due south, so a board may push you from a southeast plane to a south plane, but it cannot order the panels onto a north-facing roof and it has no location power at all over the parts of the compass outside that window. The proviso is the safeguard: the determination must not impair the effective operation of the solar collectors. If the board's chosen plane is shaded, structurally unsuitable, or costs meaningful production, the determination fails the statute's own condition and the owner is back to installing where the system works.

Notice what the section does not do. It says nothing about approval deadlines, nothing about ground-mounted arrays, and nothing about access to sunlight across a neighbour's land. Section 544 voids a restriction on your own building; it does not create an easement that stops the lot behind you from growing trees or putting up a taller house. It also does not reach panels mounted on a condominium patio railing, because subsection (c) excludes patio railings in condominiums, cooperatives, and apartments from the whole section.

Where the community is a common interest community governed by Title 27A, the approval timing gap is partly filled by 27A V.S.A. § 3-120(c). If the declaration authorizes the association to adopt rules establishing and enforcing construction and design criteria and aesthetic standards, that subsection requires the association to adopt procedures for enforcement and for approval of construction applications, including a reasonable time within which the association must act after an application is submitted and the consequences of its failure to act. A Vermont board that runs a design review process without ever having adopted a stated turnaround time and a stated consequence for missing it is not complying with § 3-120(c), and § 3-120(h) adds that every rule must be reasonable.

Subsection (c) of § 544 also records why the legislature acted: to protect the public health, safety, and welfare by encouraging the development and use of renewable resources, in order to conserve and protect the value of land, buildings, and resources by preventing measures that will have the ultimate effect, whether or not intended, of driving the costs of owning and operating commercial or residential property beyond the capacity of private owners to maintain. The phrase whether or not intended is doing work. It tells a court to look at the practical effect of an aesthetic covenant, not at whether the drafters were thinking about solar when they wrote it.

One related Vermont provision is worth knowing while you plan. Section 545 of the same chapter voids deed restrictions added after March 1, 2021 that prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting land development allowed under 24 V.S.A. § 4412(1)(E) and (2)(A), and voids post-July 2023 covenants imposing minimum dwelling unit sizes or excess parking minimums in served areas. The chapter's pattern is consistent: Vermont keeps stripping private covenants of the power to block state housing and energy policy.

There is no state regulator to complain to. Section 544 makes the offending covenant void rather than illegal, so the remedy runs through the courts. The lever the statute gives you is subsection (b): in any litigation arising under the section, the prevailing party is entitled to costs and reasonable attorney's fees. That is a two-way shift, so it protects an owner with a clean § 544 claim and it punishes an owner who sues over a location determination that was in fact within the southern window and did not impair the system's operation.

§ 4-117(a), which permits a unit owner to sue to enforce a right granted or an obligation imposed by the title, the declaration, or the bylaws, with reasonable attorney fees and costs available to the court. § 3-102(g)(2) expressly permits the board to decline to enforce a restriction that is likely to be construed as inconsistent with law, which is exactly what a solar ban is in Vermont. § 3-116(a), so raise § 544 in writing at the hearing rather than ignoring the notice. The practical sequence that works: submit the application, cite § 544 in it, ask the board in writing to state its location determination and to confirm the determination does not impair effective operation, and keep the answer.