Vermont Pioneers 10-Day Rooftop Solar Permits

May 23rd, 2012 by Susan Kraemer

One of the avoidable costs of going solar is the current unnecessary bureaucratic delays in getting the solar permits.

When we went solar in 2010, it only took half an hour for the solar salesperson to convince us to go solar, but then it took another long eight months for our city building inspector to bring himself to believe that industry leaders (SunRun/Petersen Dean/Yingli panels/SMA inverter) knew what they were doing in designing our installation.

Having agreed to go solar in February it was mid October before our roof began shipping its clean electrons into the California grid. The building inspector kept putting off a decision due to uncertainty and inexperience with solar, so it was not a cut and dried decision with any kind of template for decision-making as there is with building codes that he was used to following.

As you can imagine, this kind of delay wastes a lot of time and money for the solar industry, adding to the hassle factor of going solar in a way that could be changed.

SunRun estimated in a study done last year that permitting adds an average cost of $2,500 to each solar installation and that just streamlining that process would create the equivalent of a $1 billion stimulus to the solar industry over the next five years. The extra cost – $500 per kilowatt – is caused by wide permitting variations that are completely unconnected to safety, variable fees, and by simple procrastination by city officials.

Vermont has pioneered a solution. They began by prescribing that every install under 5 kW can be permitted after just 10 days, following a simple, free, and pre-determined process to get a solar permit, which they appropriately and pleasingly named a “Certificate of Public Good.”

This week they expanded their program that cuts paperwork and uncertainty to cover more projects – up to 10 kW in size, which is large enough to cover virtually all home solar systems.

The new process replaces all permitting for ground or roof-mounted solar systems 10kW and smaller with a single basic registration form outlining the system components, configuration, and compliance with interconnection requirements.

Then the local utility has 10 days to raise any interconnection issues, otherwise a permit is granted and the project may be installed.

The Department of Energy has begun to attempt to reduce these sorts of “soft costs” of solar, on a nationwide basis. What Vermont has done is to show how straightforward that can be.

“We think the Vermont registration process could be a real model to follow nationally,” said President and General Manager of SMA America Jurgen Krehnke of the program earlier this year. But that might not be so easy.

Unfortunately, as with many other clean energy and energy efficiency issues, there are vast differences in states’ building and permitting codes, for a reason.

Solar power production on your roof may seem like an obvious “Public Good” to a blue state like Vermont, but to coal-powered states in the South, whose utilities make more money when their customers use more dirty power, the prospect of easy solar installs could be construed as anything but.

Image: home solar roof via Shutterstock

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Tags: 10 day solar permit, efficient solar permits, pioneers, quick solar permit, solar permits, Vermont

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

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Susan Kraemer,
You started put making some valid points then you just had to “red state/green state” politicize it. Where I live, the heavily democratic city will take weeks to approve a solar permit and the surrounding Republican county will process a permit in less than an hour!
Jan

A permit to put some panels on your own roof? In The Netherlands (pot smoking liberal communists) you do not need a permit (unless you live in a monument). You only need an electrician to do the final connection.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  Ah, the NL, so damn practical… how i miss living there!
GaryBIS

I guess I did not realize how easy we have it in MT. I just sent in $45 with my permit application and got the permit back by return mail in less than a week. After I installed the system, the inspector came out the day after I called him and signed the permit off. The utility people came out about 3 days later with the new net meter.
Everyone I dealt with was friendly and knew what they were doing.
Puzzling that its so difficult and expense in some areas.
Gary
- http://muckrack.com/dotcommodity Susan Kraemer
  
  Very interesting!
- Asavage
  
  Gary– Interesting. I helped work on the new Vermont law in my role with AllEarth Renewables and I’d never heard about MT’s system. I’ll look into it.
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  Nice.
  
  And yes, it is very puzzling…
http://www.facebook.com/people/Stan-Stein/1756064509 Stan Stein

Yet ANOTHER way the public sector causes problems…..in fact, if you took away illegal immigrants, cronic welfare mamas, and bullies….the public sector would be the cause of of almost ALL problems in our country…everyone elses too I guess.
Think about it…..would YOU, as a citizen, support anything the public sector does that provides no real advantage for people?
Maybe we should rename the orgs of the public sector
“public’s enemy number one”
- Bob_Wallace
  
  Yep, Stan, you’ve got it all scoped out.
  
  Illegal immigrants, cronic (sic) welfare mamas, and bullies….the public sector. That’s what caused the financial industry meltdown and the enormous recession that’s still hurting us.
  
  And those immigrants and mama bullies, causing global warming as well as polluting our air and water.
  
  Oh yeah, how about how the bully mama immigrants started three wars over oil and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people?
  
  (You checked out the right-wing terrorist mama bullies that have been trying to blow us up? I guess illegal immigrants are sneaking guns and bombs in to them, eh?)
  
  —
  
  Personally I think stupidity is “public’s (sic) enemy number one”.
RobS

$500/kw used to be a small faction of the system cost, now it is closer to 1/3 of the cost of a system. With the modules themselves falling 30-50% in cost year on year these balance of system costs are going to be increasingly important. We will soon reach a point where the panels are the cheapest part of a solar system.
rkt9

Thanks for bringing this issue up, I have never seen it mentioned before.
http://www.eatingwithzombies.com/ zombiesgirl

There are a few cities in California that recognize that the solar permit fee shouldn’t be so high eg Santa Monica, where it’s free, and some that allow small system’s permit to be over the counter eg City of LA ,
- http://cleantechnica.com/ Zachary Shahan
  
  Good to know. Thanks for the note.