That’s great and yet asking will not deter Mayors from using the permitting process from helping to fill their City coffers. What Granholm is asking these Mayors to do is reduce the soft costs and use a SolarAPP+ to make it ‘simple’ to install solar PV on one’s home. Like many politicians in the U.S. these Mayors are not looking to reduce permitting fees and try to generate money for the City by reducing permitting fees and “hope” volume will make up the difference.

” The U.S. Dept. of Energy recently published a study investigating the role solar power will play in the country’s urgent decarbonization. The department found that solar has the potential to power 40% of the nation’s electricity by 2035, but bold policymaking is necessary to reach that goal.”

Take this so called “goal” and take a regional look at what each State of the Union is using right now for electricity generation and you will find in some places all decarbonized resources add up to 40% or more. Example: Arizona is in extreme drought and the amount of hydrogeneration was at 8% of the States needs, is down to around 2% now. But, Arizona has a combined solar PV generation capacity counting large utility and individual home solar PV systems installed is around 20%, utilities APS, SRP and TEP have solar PV farms and utility scale energy storage going in over the next four years, the Palo Verde Nuclear plant has been providing Arizona with about 35% of its energy needs each day. In Arizona this decarbonization has already happened and has been in place since about 2016.

” A study by BloombergNEF and Schneider Electric found that adding solar during new residential construction, as California now mandates, yields double the profitability over adding solar to existing homes. The extra returns can be contributed to lower soft costs as well as lower labor and construction costs.”

An article recently published has stated that the IRR of solar PV on new construction is right at 40%, solar PV installed on existing older homes is still at an IRR of about 20%, with green banks and interest rates what they are now, one can find something in the 5% loan range to combine many energy efficiency programs into one all encompassing loan.