Only one in ten US households has rooftop solar, while in Australia it’s one in three.
It’s not hard to figure out why Australia outperforms the United States. The median cost to install a 7-kW solar system in Australia is $4,000. In the US, it’s $28,000.
This is especially bad news now, as electricity prices escalate faster than inflation in the United States.
This data comes from Nick Josefowitz, chief executive of Permit Power, and our guest on Energy Changemakers Podcast, “How to Make It Easier for American Families to Go Solar.”
“One in seven Americans struggles to pay their electricity bills to the extent that they’re having to make trade-offs between paying their electricity bills and paying for other basic necessities,” he says. “And it’s not like the quality of their electricity has gotten better. In some cases, actually, reliability has gone down.”
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Rooftop solar can reduce monthly electric bills. But the solar industry is on shaky ground right now with the loss of federal tax credits under Trump-led legislation passed in July. The industry is seeking new business models and project configurations to make up for the shortfall.
Expensive solar soft costs
Permit Power is on the case, launching an effort to reduce solar soft costs, which account for 80% of what Americans pay for installing rooftop solar.
If rooftop solar were as cheap it is in peer countries, American households could save $1,600 annually. That amounts to $56,000 in savings over the 25-year lifetime of a solar PV system or $1.2 trillion across all households installing solar, according to a report by Permit Power.
Getting solar soft costs down requires rethinking the bureaucratic red tape associated with permitting in the US. Although inexpensive software exists to make the process quicker and easier, some jurisdictions still use paper and manual review.
And it’s not just the cost that deters adoption of solar. It can also be the months of waiting for permit approval. Households get frustrated, step out of line, and spend their money elsewhere. Josefowitz’s back-of-the-envelope calculator finds that the 300 jurisdictions now using automated permitting have saved households about 1 million days.
A big undertaking
Because much of the work needs to happen at the local level, it requires a lot of legwork. Josefowitz says there are 20,000 local governments that issue permits.
In our conversation, he breaks down the hard and soft costs of solar and explains the steps Permit Power is taking to encourage automated permitting as a way to save money and time.
It turns out automated permitting doesn’t just help the homeowner — it also takes pressure off government. Josefowitz points to a study that finds it could save government workers thousands of years of time. So if you know anyone working in local permitting — or lawmakers and city councilors who influence it — please pass along this podcast to them.
