Sunny side up in the US: Biden rolls out instant solar rooftop permits

President Joe Biden is on a mission: decarbonizing the U.S. electricity grid by 2035. In order to accomplish this, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that the implementation of new solar installations needs to speed up 5x faster than today. Therefore they created a tool called Solar Automated Permit Processing (SolarAPP+) platform to speed up the process & lower the costs.

Why?

There are currently two issues that delay the rooftop solar application process & withhold people from applying:

  1. Permit processing time. About 1/3 of rooftop solar installations take more than two weeks for the permit process to complete.
  2. Permit-related costs. These can account for up to 1/3 of installers' overall costs.

The tool will tackle both. By standardizing requirements & streamlining the application, approvals can now be automated. The first test results look promising. In Tucson the portal reduced permitting review times from an average of 20 days to 0.

What’s next?

Local governments don’t have to pay for the portal. DOE is challenging 125 mayors and local officials to sign up for the SolarAPP tool before the end of the summer.

Sobolt serves >100 governments in the energy transition & is ready to expand. Curious for the solar rooftop potential in your government or city? Contact j.vanzwieten@sobolt.com


Source: Reuters. Photo by Vivint Solar on Unsplash.

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