Permitting a residential rooftop solar project in Tucson, Ariz., used to take up to 20 business days; now thanks to a one-stop, online permitting platform developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, it takes one day or less.

The Department of Energy rolled out the new platform ― the Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus (SolarAPP+) ― with an online webinar on Thursday and a challenge from Secretary Jennifer Granholm: to have 125 cities across the country using the platform by the end of September.

Fast, online permitting will, Granholm said, “cut the red tape that often delays the solar permitting process. In some parts of the country, customers have to wait weeks for approvals before they can get their solar installations online; in other places, it’s months, and all those days add up to distractions from larger projects [and] to dollars lost, obviously. It contributes to climate change because the more [solar] we can get online faster, the more we can do our part to reduce the impacts of climate change.”

Citing data from NREL, she said, project delays in the last year alone cost homeowners an estimated $16 million in energy savings.

After working with the solar industry, local governments and other stakeholders to develop the app, NREL started testing it at the end of 2020 with pilot projects in Tucson, Pima, Ariz., and Pleasant Hill, Calif. Preliminary results from the pilots show that the cities were collectively able to almost triple the number of applications processed. (See NREL Apps Accelerate Rooftop Approvals.)

The app has since been launched in Menifee, Calif., and is now being piloted in four more California communities and Montgomery County, Md. Initial tests are underway in 14 more communities in six states, according to DOE.

Tucson Mayor Regina Romero reported that the platform had allowed the city to approve “about 450 installations in the last 60 days alone, and because time is money, we can charge you less for the permit. What that means is that it becomes less expensive for the installation, and we make solar much more available to low-income communities in our city.”

In Stockton, Calif., one of the communities now piloting the app, Deputy City Manager John Alita said that rooftop solar applications now make up about one-quarter of the city’s permitting load, “so, a lot of intensive staff time goes into this.”

Permitting turnarounds used to be about four days, Alita said; now it’s “instantaneous,” saving significant staff time. The app is also going to help the city process the permits for a new state-funded project to install free solar panels on the roofs of more than 100 low-income homes and four multifamily developments. “We’re also trying to boost our promotion of state and federal [solar] incentives,” he said. “With that kind of campaign, we do expect to see a higher influx of applications.”

Lynn Jurich, CEO of residential installer Sunrun, sees the app as a catalyst for scaling and aggregating rooftop solar as a grid asset. “What this tool is going to enable us to do is really build out that distributed system to complement that centralized system,” she said. “[If] we put solar and batteries on 10,000 homes, that’s a 100-MW power plant that we can dispatch into the system.”

Jurich underlined the untapped potential of the rooftop solar market, noting that in countries such as Australia, where automated permitting is the norm, more than a quarter of all homes have installations versus 3% in the U.S. Citing figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association, Granholm said the U.S. market only recently passed the 100-GW mark, with close to 3 million installations across the country.

Reaching President Biden’s goal of a decarbonized electric system by 2035 will mean deploying “hundreds and hundreds of more gigawatts of solar capacity to the grid,” Granholm said. “The record-breaking heat waves and droughts and wildfires tell us the costs of delay are simply too high, and at the same time, the economics tell us that there’s simply no reason to wait.”

To further promote market expansion, DOE is also launching a “Summer of Solar” campaign, with events to be announced across the country, Granholm said.

‘No Human Touch’

As panel prices have fallen, the solar industry has increasingly focused on “soft costs” — customer acquisition, labor, permitting and inspection — which now make up about two-thirds of the cost of a system, according to SEIA. SolarAPP+ is aimed at cutting the permitting part of that equation.

The platform allows a licensed solar installer to submit a permit application online. The application is checked to ensure it complies with all relevant electrical and safety codes, and a permit is issued after the contractor pays a fee.

The app also checks the structural integrity of the home, said Jeff Cook, NREL’s lead developer for SolarAPP+. “We have compliance-related requirements for it. We’re also evaluating the wind and snow load requirements of the community, as well as the temperatures, all in the process of approving the project.”

Detailing more of the preliminary results from the pilot cities, Cook said that in addition to increasing the number of applications processed, the platform saved these jurisdictions about 186 hours in staff time, without adding time to project inspections.

“The inspectors in those communities have already mentioned to us that they expect in the future, having one standardized inspection checklist is going to making inspections a lot easier to do, as opposed to looking at the 1,001 different single-line or three-line diagrams they get today,” Cook said.

He also noted that during the pilots, only 5% of the projects approved through SolarAPP+ failed their initial inspections, and most of those were from miscommunication on the process. “There was confusion about what documents needed to be on-site for the inspection and which didn’t,” he said.

A bill now sitting in the California legislature, SB 617, would require cities to use an online permitting platform for residential solar and storage projects, with exemptions for counties with a population of less than 150,000.

NREL is working on expanding the system to permit storage projects, and eventually, it hopes to be able to handle larger commercial installations, Cook said. At present, however, it can only be used for residential rooftop installations. Cities or other local jurisdictions can sign up for free, and licensed contractors pay $25/application.

Going forward, Cook sees the system also integrating with utility interconnection processes. “We’re going to be working with utilities to make [interconnection] more seamless, so that in the future, a human doesn’t have to review the permitting process. They can have everything automated into the interconnection portal as well so that there’s no human touch, but we confirm the design is code compliant.”