One of the easiest things policymakers could do to accelerate the transition to clean energy is to reduce the permitting costs associated with installing residential rooftop solar systems.
According to Andrew Birch, co-founder and CEO of OpenSolar, standardizing the design and permitting process would dramatically lower costs for residential and commercial-scale solar projects.
Cutting red tape would help consumers, the climate and the economy, especially as demand for residential clean energy systems increases.
According to PV Magazine, over 50 million single-family homeowners in the United States want to install solar panels. That number has increased by 13 percent since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. The good news is that the cost of installing solar panels has dropped by 89 percent over the past 10 years. The bad news is that all the other costs – customer acquisition, permitting, inspection, connecting to the grid, installation, taxation, and system financing – have not.
These “soft costs” are an unnecessary impediment to consumers and solar companies. Solar panels are just 10 percent of the cost of a residential solar system. Yet, buyers pay significantly more than homeowners in other parts of the world due to the "soft costs" of permitting. In Australia, for example, where one in five homes has a solar energy component, consumers pay between $1.10 and $1.20 a watt, and it takes just one to three weeks to get that system installed.
But because of the sheer number of separate jurisdictions in this country – 16,000 in all, each with different levels of decision-making, inconsistent interpretations of the electrical code, and often unfamiliar technologies, the process of installing a solar system can take two or three months or even longer. Going solar ends up costing American homeowners $3.40 a watt.
Birch targets these soft costs through his company, OpenSolar, which provides an open-source software platform that combines design and a digital management and sales toolkit with one-click permitting.
The free app makes designing, selling, and managing solar systems easy for contractors.
Birch is also working on SolarAPP, a collaborative effort with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), local regulators and the solar industry. The goal of SolarAPP, which launches this spring, is to increase the adoption of rooftop solar by simplifying the approval process for local governments through its web-based PV-permitting tool, standardizing the permitting process and evaluating applications for safety and compliance.
Over the next five years, Birch expects to make solar more affordable and accessible, save consumers over $7,000 per installation, help governments operate more efficiently, all while saving consumers money and creating jobs.
“It’s not just lowering the cost of energy for the whole, it’s also shifting what you are paying into this hyper-productive, economically-generative, tax-generative, local economy,” Birch told The Freeing Energy Podcast in January. “It’s either little government or big government, but if you stop subsidizing fossil fuels, and you stop subsidizing environmental cleanup, and put a price on carbon, and you get rid of the paperwork, which the big guys don’t have to deal with, that the small guys do, and just let the people deliver clean energy, that’s the answer.”
To learn more about SolarAPP, visit The Solar Foundation.
To hear more from Birch, check out his conversation with Nico Johnson at Suncast last year and his January appearance on The Freeing Energy Podcast.