Solar Permitting process needs a total revamp

By Sandipan B. , Chairman & CEO at Staten Solar

In a typical commercial and industrial (C&I) solar project, we budget about 4-8 weeks for construction. And we have to wait six to eight months to obtain the building permits.

Solar plan-set is not complicated and doesn’t have millions of details that would typically be required in a new building construction project for example. Once a competent plan checker starts reviewing the plan-set, it should just be a matter of a few hours.

This delay in getting the permits impedes the speed of construction, industry’s annual volume and growth rate. Our company’s revenue and other key metrics, for example, are generally permit constrained. We estimate that our annual revenue and colume could increase 30-50% if the permitting process across the land could become streamlined and efficient.

I can only speculate the reasons for this dysfunction. There are clearly no standard or agreed upon guidelines, templates, processes or covenants by the AHJ - and that could certainly be a problem.

Second, technology is changing fast; and along with it the relevant codes – and it may be hard to catch up. In one of our projects, for example, we got notification that “your due date has been delayed by 5 business days and the new due date is xxx” TWENTY ONE time. That’s 105 business days or 21 weeks delay! That was a storage project and maybe the Jurisdiction had its planners waiting to get trained.

Third, maybe there are not enough resources at the AHJ. In one jurisdiction, for example, there is a four week wait to submit the planset; then it takes three weeks to schedule a plan checker; and the plan-checker has two weeks to review the submission. At that point even a simple comment triggers a revision and the process starts again!

The permitting process needs a total revamp. Standardization, out sourcing, phased training and loading and pre-checks can all help. The industry has taken some strides in getting the residential solar permitting under control. We need to do the same for the C&I space.

Imagine how it would feel to get the solar permit for your commercial project within a week! We can get there – and we all will gladly pay for it.

We welcome your thoughts and insights—feel free to share them with us at [email protected].

Best,

Sam