A solar array is going up on a roof of a home or business in the U.S. every four minutes — by one estimate — but getting them hooked up to the grid can take a lot longer. And as the demand grows for photovoltaic solar panels, the processing, approval and connection is becoming a bigger issue and potential barrier.
“Addressing this is critical to widespread adoption of PV,” said Kristen Ardani, co-author of a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study of the time it takes to apply for and hook-up home and small-business systems to the grid.
Ardani’s study — based on data from 87 utilities in 16 states — found that while the average time from application to connection to be 53 business days, in Colorado it was 60 business days.
The installation of the panels on a roof took two to four days of that time.
Another NREL study warned that permitting, inspection and interconnection delays could become “a market barrier that can deter project completion entirely.”
Faced with the growing list of homeowners opting for solar, Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electricity supplier, and the state’s main trade group, the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association, have taken steps aimed at speeding approvals.
“We are growing into a new era of solar in Colorado,” said John Bringenberg, a COSEIA board member. “Our systems have to change with it.”
Rooftop solar is soaring in Colorado and across the nation, which saw a record 6,201 megawatts of installations in 2014, a 30 percent increase over 2013, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.
Annual home installations in Colorado more than doubled between 2012 and 2014 to 42 megawatts.
In May, Xcel Energy launched a new online, cloud-computing-based portal for its customers and panel installers to file applications.
The utility’s “legacy system” couldn’t keep up, said Lee Gabler, Xcel’s director of energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Parts of the filing are now automated; signatures can be done electronically.
High marks
Solar installers and industry representatives give Xcel’s new system high marks.
“It is much more transparent and enables you to track projects,” said Dan Yechout, residential solar sales director for Boulder-based installer Namaste Solar.
Using the portal, application work and approvals can be done in about two weeks, Yechout said.
While applications can be done online for Xcel, municipal applications and those for other utilities are still done on paper, Yechout said.
When a customer applies for rooftop solar through the portal, the application goes into a queue for Xcel’s Solar Rewards program.
Solar Rewards provides an incentive of 2 cents for each kilowatt-hour a customer-owned home solar unit generates and 1 cent for each kilowatt-hour generated by leased systems.
The program, however, has a cap of 24 megawatts a year, Gabler said. Since 2006, 24,232 customers have installed 223 megawatts of solar generation under the Solar Rewards program.
Even with the improvement in online applications, installers say that there are still problems with Xcel’s system.
“Sometimes it feels as if utilities are not trying to make this partnership work,” said Will Craven, a spokesman for SolarCity, which leases home solar panels in 16 states.
SolarCity has 7,000 customers in Colorado, according to the company.
In Xcel’s Colorado service area, it takes an average of 41 days to complete a residential system, Craven said.
That isn’t as bad as SolarCity’s experience with Maryland’s Pepco — 90 days — but it puts Xcel in the bottom quarter, Craven said.
Among the best performers, Craven said, are Connecticut Light & Power and San Diego Gas and Electric at five days or less.
As Solar Rewards incentives have been cut — and are set to become smaller — some customers are ready to forgo them and just install panels, Namaste’s Yechout said.
It turns out that is more complicated and time-consuming than applying for a Solar Rewards incentive, he said.
“You can’t go through the portal. And unless the installer is persistent, an application can languish,” Yechout said. “It will be essential for the utility to create a process for these applications because more and more customers will go that route.”
Xcel plans to add this type of application to the online portal, the company said.
Streamlining steps
Ardani’s NREL analysis found that nationally the largest chunk of time is tied up in the utility application process — an average of 18 days.
The second-most-time-consuming step was getting the permission to tie into the grid — 10 to 12 days.
“But every state is different, and so are the challenges,” Ardani said.
The NREL study didn’t break out the time for local building permit applications.
In some Colorado communities this can take as long as 45 days, Yechout said.
In 2012, the state trade group COSEIA launched the “Solar Friendly Communities” program to encourage local governments to streamline permitting.
“It is a voluntary program, but the response has been very good,” COSEIA executive director Rebecca Cantwell said.
The program now covers 16 Front Range counties and communities, with about half the state’s population, Cantwell said.
“As solar arrays become more standardized, we are trying to encourage local building departments to think of them not like a custom house addition but a furnace,” she said.
Changes made by Fort Collins knocked two weeks off the city’s permitting process, Cantwell said. Denver provides one-day, over-the-counter permits.
Once a system is on the roof, the last step is for Xcel to add a second meter to measure the solar electricity it produces. Yechout said this can take 15 to 20 days.
San Diego Gas & Electric has an online system where it can take as little as four days to complete the applications and interconnection, said Ken Parks, the utility’s customer generation manager.
“We have seen a dramatic growth in solar,” Parks said. “We have to keep up.”
In 2012, the San Diego utility approved 5,200 solar arrays. It expects to approve more than 22,000 this year, Parks said.
And when all the approvals are in and the panels are up, they are immediately plugged into the grid.
“We don’t have to add a meter,” Parks said. “We have smart meters that we can program remotely, and then they are on.”
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912, mjaffe@denverpost.com or twitter.com/bymarkjaffe
