We are excited to beta launch Project Permit, an interactive website that scores local permitting practices to help lower solar costs across the country. It’s designed to help solar stakeholders, municipal officials, and people like you understand how their town’s permitting practices stack up and what can be done to improve them.
Few realize how much of an impact local governments can have on the cost of going solar. But with solar panel prices having dropped fast and far over the past few years, “soft” costs like local permitting represent the most significant opportunity for keeping solar prices trending down. Today, more than 18,000 municipalities set their own permitting requirements for residential solar energy systems. As a result, permitting requirements vary dramatically city by city. Long waits, high fees, excessive inspections, avoidable paperwork and non-standard practices across different jurisdictions can all add unnecessary costs to what should be a simple, transparent process.
Chances are, your own hometown is one of those that could stand to improve its solar permitting procedures. Here’s what you can do: See how your community measures up to best practices on our interactive solar permitting map. And if it’s lagging, put our local advocacy toolkit to call on your mayor for action!
As of today’s beta launch we have information for 800 communities. It’s beta so you can help us make it betta (get it!?). If you see a city that’s missing data help us out by adding it yourself at SolarPermit.org.
Because it represents such a strong opportunity for continued residential solar cost reduction, permitting has become a priority issue for many in the solar industry.
“We’ve found that out of the thousands of solar projects Clean Power Finance facilitates, permitting issues cause more delays than any other issue,” said Matt Ziskin director of product incubation at Clean Power Finance. “Removing unnecessary permitting requirements is one if the keys to making U.S. solar installation costs competitive.”
“Based on our 2011 study, inconsistent local permitting standards add an average of over $2,500 to the cost of each home solar installation across the country,” added Bryan Miller, VP of public policy & power markets at Sunrun, the nation’s leading home solar company. “We’ve been working diligently to remove or significantly lower this cost and help Americans save money by switching to solar.”
Jane Weissman, executive director of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s (IREC), points out that streamlined permitting practices are a win for cities too: “We have found that permitting improvements can save time and costs for everyone involved – city staff, solar installers and customers alike. The best practices we’ve helped outline on Project Permit make it easy to make sure your hometown is open for solar business.”
We were proud to work with a number of great partners on this project, including some of the folks quoted above. We developed the site with funding from Solar 3.0, a DOE Sunshot Initiative program managed by SolarTech. The data for our community scores comes from from SolarPermit.org, a free, crowd-sourced resource run by Clean Power Finance with further SunShot support. Project Permit then scores that local data against best practices metrics developed by Vote Solar and IREC.
Now people like you are the final piece of this collaborative campaign. We hope you’ll put it to good use at home lowering those solar costs.
For those who’d like to dig even deeper, we have a recording of today’s launch webinar available for your viewing pleasure. Big thanks to Berkeley National Lab, Clean Power Finance and IREC for joining us to talk about solar permitting today.
Webinar: Introducing Project Permit from Vote Solar on Vimeo.
