NREL Releases Its 2022 SolarAPP+ Performance Review

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released its 2022 Annual Performance Review of its automated solar project permitting system – The Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus (SolarAPP+).

Solar energy is an increasingly popular option to meet Americans’ energy needs. As of 2022, 39 percent of Americans had given serious thought to installing solar panels on their home within the past year. As rooftop photovoltaic (PV) becomes more efficient, accessible, desirable and prevalent, some towns and cities are finding it is straining the capacity of local government staff to issue permits.

SolarAPP+ aims to reduce this gap in staff capacity.

SEE RELATED: Contribute to the SolarAPP+ and Help Streamline Residential Solar Permitting Processes

The SolarAPP+ software – developed by NREL, in collaboration with industry and the building safety community, and with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy – was designed to automate the process for towns and cities to do plan reviews and issue permits for residential PV systems and solar-plus-storage systems.

Leveraging the redundancies across common solar installation plans, NREL estimates that SolarAPP+ can cover 70 to 80 percent of plan reviews that a local government would otherwise have to issue manually.

SolarAPP+ Annual Performance Report

The 2022 Annual Performance Report highlighted six key findings:

1. The adoption of SolarAPP+ has increased substantially. Fifteen jurisdictions had publicly launched SolarAPP+ by the end of 2022, sixteen more were piloting the platform and eight-nine were testing or preparing to pilot SolarAPP+.
2. The geographic scope of implementation has increased. Though SolarAPP+ was initially predominantly used in Arizona and California, other states, such as Connecticut, Texas and Virginia, have now implemented it.
3. The number of permits successfully issued by SolarAPP+ has increased. Across 31 towns and cities, 206 installers submitted more than 11,000 permits using SolarAPP+ in 2022, which reflects a 300 percent increase over 2021.
4. SolarAPP+ reports faster average project timelines compared to other methods. A typical SolarAPP+ project was permitted, installed and inspected approximately 13 business days sooner than projects permitted in the traditional way.
5. SolarAPP+ reports an approximate savings of 9,900 hours of staff time in 2022 due to SolarAPP+’s ability to provide feedback, check for errors and review permits instantaneously.
6. SolarAPP+ finds that these improvements have no downstream negative impact on inspections. SolarAPP+ projects were approximately 29 percent less likely to fail inspections than projects that were permitted the traditional way.

More information about SolarAPP+ can be found here.  

Information about registering for a SolarAPP+ Demo to learn more about the tool can be found here.