Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It with Red Tape?

Earlier this summer, Tara McDermott, who’s in charge of policy communications for a New York state solar developer called EmPower Solar, was telling me a woeful tale a lot like others I’d been hearing lately. A customer whom I’ll call Pam had tried to put solar panels on top of her home in Mount Vernon to save money and help the planet. EmPower submitted its first permit application to the city in September 2023 and then went back and forth with them for months as the city asked for revisions, updated proof of insurance, and other documentation from Pam. Eventually, one of McDermott’s colleagues got fed up and reached out to the mayor for assistance—in fact, he drove to City Hall and asked to see her. Upon being told that she wasn’t in her office, he said he’d sit there and wait for her return.

“It turns out the mayor was indeed there in her office and couldn’t leave without passing him,” McDermott recalled, warming to her tale. “So they called the police on my guy to remove him from the space—they deemed him a threat.”

Eventually, after some negotiation, two cops were detailed to accompany the EmPower employee upstairs to the building department, and they all sat there for two hours while staff worked on the permit for the solar panels. But not, unfortunately, the permit for the electric wiring that goes with it. Before that step could happen, Pam’s loan agreement expired. “There are no options left and she probably can’t go solar. And we’ve spent hundreds of hours on this one house,” McDermott told me.

This tale was absurd enough on its own. But then she said something else, almost in passing: “Our CEO went to southern Spain two years ago during all this, just staying with some friends at their house there. And they wanted solar, and he was the solar guy, so they asked him. They all went to the local store, something like Best Buy, and they picked the system he recommended and signed up, and by the time he left Spain two weeks later, it was already installed and running. This wasn’t DIY or under the radar. They did it legally. Imagine that world.”

In many countries, people don’t have to imagine it. A million and a half Germans have installed “balcony solar”—they simply went to the big-box store, bought a giant panel for a few hundred euros, hung it from their apartment railing, and produced up to a quarter of their household’s power needs. Other European countries have followed suit. Ditto Australia, where Saul Griffith, author of the new book Plug In!, notes that permits can be had in a single day using a smartphone app—“the tradie [contractor] often does this for you. In Australia, it takes two or three days once you’ve made the decision to do it to get the system up and running.”

But not in America, where President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are pulling out all the stops to destroy renewable power. They’ve shut down big offshore wind projects, they’re limiting projects on public lands, and the “Big Beautiful Bill” not only rolled back tax credits for large-scale renewable projects, it took direct aim at precisely the kind of rooftop solar work that thousands of small contractors like EmPower produce. Upon news that the bill would phase out tax credits for residential solar by the end of 2025, the already depressed stock price of Sunrun, the country’s biggest residential solar provider, fell 40 percent; PV Magazine, the industry trade journal, headlined its story “U.S. Residential Solar on the Brink of Collapse.”

That’s a very real possibility—we’ve seen the same thing once before, when the Reagan administration withdrew federal support for solar installers and, almost overnight, the solar workforce plummeted. The cuts the GOP-controlled Congress pushed through in July could take out as many as 400,000 jobs, per recent estimates. Notably, these latest efforts come after the two hottest years in human history and at a moment when, worldwide, solar power is growing faster than any energy source in history—putting both the planet and the country’s technological leadership at risk.

So giving in to Trump’s attack is not an option. Instead, we need to figure out how to keep rooftop solar growing even without the federal tax credits that have spurred it in the recent past. Doing that will require, among other things, unclogging the peculiarly American system of local permitting that has played a huge role in making “going solar” far more expensive than it needs to be. If Pam’s system had gone up in an afternoon with far less paperwork, we’d be in a very different place—a place where the “abundance” debate meets the climate crisis and offers a real way out.

“It’s so cheap to build a solar panel now. It’s cheaper than producing a plank of wood…But we’ve swaddled this engineering miracle in rolls and rolls of red tape to make it too expensive for American families.”

Let’s go back to Australia for a moment. Down under, Griffith says, “rooftop solar installs at about 55 cents a watt, meaning electricity that ends up costing 2 or 3 cents a kilowatt-hour. In the US, it averages about $2.50 a watt, and in San Francisco, I paid $5.80 per watt.” That means it takes much longer to recoup the cost of a project and far fewer people are willing to take it on. About a third of Australian homes now have rooftop solar—seven times more than in America. The glacial speed of our local permitting plays a huge role. Contractors have to keep “rolling trucks” to revisit your roof and redraw plans. By some estimates, a one-week delay can result in a 10 percent client cancellation rate, which means solar developers have to spend ever more money on customer acquisition. (You’ve seen the ads.) Meanwhile, interest accrues on any loans taken out to finance such projects—it all adds up.

The slow permitting is not the only problem—once the panels are on the roof, utilities often drag their feet in connecting them to the grid, part of the fossil fuel industry’s ongoing war against renewables. Some areas have made meaningful progress with this “interconnection” problem, and the work to push utilities to move faster continues, often at the level of state public utility commissions and the seven “independent system operators,” or ISOs, that run the nation’s grid. But these big power players can’t do much about, say, the Mount Vernon building inspector. America’s commitment to local control enables a tangle of entities to set the pace of solar growth.

Happily, because many of those jurisdictions are firmly in blue hands, there’s still plenty to be done, even with Washington doing its damnedest to sabotage clean energy. Democratic leaders seem to be warming to the abundance agenda—at least they’re finally talking about whether America can be reconfigured to once more build ambitious projects. But even if we could wave a magic wand and get projects like high-speed rail or clean-power transmission corridors moving, such monumental efforts will take a while and, as with former President Joe Biden’s spending on clean energy, voters might never notice the improvement—or know who deserves the credit.

But up on your own roof? You notice that. If you could easily get a permit to install a low-cost machine that could save you money, and, oh yes, also help ward off the civilizational challenge that is climate change, you might start thinking a little differently about government. Forget YIMBYs for a moment—we’re talking YOMRs. You’ve got a right to the sunshine that falls on your home, whether you’re a renter with a balcony or a homeowner. Free the electron! We’re used to thinking of roofs as protection from rain—but the sun can also provide a shower of dollars and cents, and some bureaucrat shouldn’t force you to stay at the mercy of Big Utility. Why should the Chinese and the Australians and the Germans get access to the sun while you’re denied it? I mean, what the hell—we’re bathed in free energy every daylight hour and we need a bunch of permits to use it? What’s American about that?

“It’s so cheap to build a solar panel now,” says Nick Josefowitz, who runs the advocacy group Permit Power. “It’s cheaper than producing a plank of wood. It’s one of the great engineering miracles of our lifetimes. But we’ve swaddled this engineering miracle in rolls and rolls of red tape to make it too expensive for American families.” Although they’re reluctant to say it publicly, some industry people I spoke with said that it was possible to imagine a robust solar industry without any government subsidies (see Australia)—so long as bureaucracy got out of the way.

Want to prove government can still work? Looking for ways to balance American individualism with concern for the collective good we call “the environment”? Ready to shake off the fossil fuel oligarchy that helped lead this country into its political morass? To the ladders!

Illustration by Guillem Casasús; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty; Getty

Rooftop solar is not the only source of clean energy, of course. Utility-scale solar—big solar farms—accounts for twice as much generation in this country and a lot of the startling takeoff in clean energy around the world. But adding big projects to the grid can be complicated—you need new transmission lines and substations, which the Biden administration was working to provide and the Trump administration is now busy blocking. Fossil fuel industry players and some utilities have also deployed astroturf groups to block such projects; according to Heatmap News, this partly explains why, in at least 20 percent of US counties, it’s now essentially impossible to deploy large-scale clean energy.

So rooftop solar is a nice complement to the grid, both physically and politically. There’s enough wasted space up above our heads to supply a significant portion of the nation’s energy needs—one study found that we could generate 45 percent of our electricity this way; at the moment, we only harvest about 2 percent. Often, that rooftop array supplies power to the grid and, increasingly, it also fills batteries in the basement, which can not only power the house at night or charge an EV, but also make that house far more adaptable in times of crisis. Mary Powell, CEO of Sunrun, said that during the Los Angeles fires, when the power company cut the juice for hundreds of thousands of people out of fear its wires would spark more blazes, “our homes became the safe haven, the place where people could recharge their phones to get the news alerts. This is critical infrastructure.”

And the line between rooftop and utility-scale solar has begun to blur; new software allows the aggregation of thousands of home batteries into “virtual power plants” that can be dispatched by a utility to lessen the load on the grid. In California, Sunrun has knit together a network of 75,000 home batteries—together, they could supply enough power to run, say, all of Ventura County (pop. 830,000). In Vermont, where I live, the biggest single power plant on our grid is the network of interconnected batteries that can be called up in a pinch by Green Mountain Power. The nation’s biggest virtual power plant is now being built in Texas by stringing together hundreds of thousands of customers who use Google Nest thermostats. These networks are not just resilient—a single power plant can fail on a hot day, but not 10,000 basement batteries—they also save big money. By reducing the need for utilities to build new power plants to account for “peak loads,” the Department of Energy estimated in 2023 that battery networks could save customers at least $10 billion a year.

So, dramatically expanding the amount of solar on the roof would be an unmitigated good. As Solar United Neighbors—a nonprofit that has helped more than 11,000 families go solar, concentrating on low-income neighborhoods—puts it, “demanding utility accountability and deploying distributed solar in under-resourced communities and communities of color can catalyze a shift toward a new, equitable, distributed clean energy system.” But all of that depends, first and foremost, on making rooftop solar cheap so that more and more families and landlords can afford it. And that, in turn, depends in part on dramatically reducing the thicket of regulations that get in the way of easy deployment.

There’s enough wasted space up above our heads to supply up to 45 percent of the nation’s electricity needs; at the moment, we only harvest about 2 percent.

It’s hard for people to imagine, I think, that permitting costs could make such a difference—surely it’s a marginal part of the cost, compared to, you know, the panels. But the truth is that low-cost manufacturing pioneered by the Chinese has driven hardware costs to bizarre lows. Even before Trump upped the tariffs on foreign panels, Americans were paying three times as much as Australians for rooftop solar, and that’s explained almost entirely by the “soft costs” of permitting, marketing, and installation.

Andrew Birch, who had previously lived in Australia, remembers the hopeful days of his startup two decades ago. “We started Sungevity in the US because we thought it would be this free open market where we could sell online easily,” he says. “It turned out to be just the opposite.” When visitors would stop by to see his new operation, it seemed almost magical. “We’d take them to see the sales floor, which was full of people at computers, talking to customers. Even then, you could see a house on Google Earth and calculate quickly how much power solar could provide—our agents could design a system in a few keystrokes. Our visitors were impressed. But then I’d have to say, ‘Let’s go to the other building’—where we had another whole team, doubling the size of the company, doing customer management and permit creation work. It takes an average of three months to set up a system, and five to six months in the Northeast. And all of that head count and work adds $1.50 a watt.”

The soft costs are literally more expensive than the hardware—it’s like spending a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then another thousand for the apps. “You have to arrange a site visit and drive a truck out there,” Birch says. “You have to climb up on the roof to get the rafter spacing, do incredibly elaborate electrical drawings. Then you roll another truck to the permit office. They might have different views about how to interpret the drawings, which means change orders, which means another resell to the customer.” All of this would be bad enough if there were a single regulator to respond to, as in most countries. But in America there are something like 20,000 separate jurisdictions—cities, towns, counties—that approve building plans. Each is different. A solar contractor in a metro area might have to deal with a dozen or more permitting offices.

Sungevity died during the first Trump administration, but Birch hasn’t given up the fight. He now runs OpenSolar, “the world’s first free, end-to-end platform designed to help solar professionals grow their businesses and streamline their operations.” But those installers still run into permit blockage, which is why Birch spends much of his time proselytizing for another piece of software: It’s called SolarAPP+, and it was originally developed by the federal government’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory precisely to make permitting easier. In the several hundred jurisdictions that have adopted the tool, installers go through a checklist—what model of solar panel, what kind of inverters, how they plan to tie into the house’s electrical system—and the app spits out a permit so they can get to work; when they’re finished, an inspector can come out or, in some cases, simply review photos the installers send. Other countries have dispensed with permits altogether (in Australia, spot inspections keep installers on their toes), but in the US, SolarAPP+ is probably as streamlined as we’re likely to get. And where it’s in place, it seems to work. Louis Woofenden, a Tucson-based solar installer, says he can now get permits in a day as opposed to about five weeks in the past. As a result, he can far more easily quote prices to potential customers: “And there’s something to being able to say, ‘I have an installation slot in six weeks,’ not three months.”

Matthew McAllister, who runs the SolarAPP Foundation, says about 5 percent of the nation’s residential rooftop projects now get one of its automated permits—it topped 1,000 permits a week for the first time this past spring. “Our goal by the end of the decade is to be able to process half of applications, which would be enough to really influence soft costs and prices.”

His organization has mapped out the 1,000 jurisdictions it thinks are likely to install the most solar, and is reaching out to building departments one by one—in the last year, New Orleans and Palm Beach County in Florida have come on board. “One thing we’re always working on is to communicate that we’re a very lightweight software tool,” he says. “A level above a Chrome extension, not an IT replacement. It integrates with their existing software.”

Legislatures in California, Maryland, and most recently New Jersey have instructed their local communities to switch to SolarAPP+, and other states are considering it, but it’s always a battle. The Colorado legislature gutted a proposal this past spring to switch its communities to the technology, even though it had the potential to dramatically increase installations and save Coloradans $1 billion on their energy bills by 2030. “Local officials may think, ‘I’ll lose my job,’” Birch says. “We tell them: You’ll do five times as many solar permits. If you’re just inspecting 1 in 5, you’ll do as much work, and the city will get five times the fees.”

But that doesn’t mean it’s an easy sell to jurisdictions used to Doing Things a Certain Way. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which developed SolarAPP+, has two campuses in Colorado; Boulder County is a hotspot for climate scientists and has seen terrifying wildfires in recent years. (If you want to scare yourself silly, check out footage of families fleeing a Chuck E. Cheese near a horrendous 2021 blaze.) And yet in March, the county opposed a state bill to require the use of SolarAPP+. Ron Flax, Boulder County’s chief building official, says he’s a “huge fan” of the app, but “making it mandatory is always a little bit controversial. Any bill that tells a jurisdiction you must do X, Y, or Z—well, they value their freedom of choice.” His inspectors, he says, “still find things.” Some years ago, they had installers who weren’t grounding panels correctly—“We don’t have a well-established apprenticeship program for trades in the US; the actual craftsmen, these are not well-paid folks”—but today, he admits, zoning regulations are a bigger headache.

In any case, one senses that Flax would be just fine if Boulder residents didn’t want so many solar panels. Building mostly utility-scale solar would be “optimal,” he told me. “If my baseline electric grid is made up of mostly renewables, then I really don’t want a lot of rooftop solar,” he explained. “It’s more efficient to do that at a grid scale.”

That kind of attitude—which effectively tables the idea of distributed power generation networks—seems particularly common in progressive communities. Like Boulder, San Francisco is jam-packed with people who care about the climate, but their former mayor and current governor, Gavin Newsom, has emerged as perhaps the country’s most significant obstacle to rooftop solar, deferring to utilities and unions by reducing the price that homeowners can get for the power they sell to the grid; he even vetoed a bill last year that would have made it easier for schools and hospitals to install solar. (“We’re expending so much time, emotional and intellectual energy in Sacramento just not having the space harmed more,” says Sunrun’s Powell.) The Bay Area may be the single hardest place on Earth to permit rooftop projects. Jeanine Cotter, who runs a local solar business, gives an example: “In San Francisco, where land is expensive, we build right to the lot lines, and so one way to get light in a house is with skylights. Our code says you need 3 feet of clearance around every skylight. But if you have a small roof and skylights, well, the ability to play Tetris with solar panels—it just gets harder.”

Grace Kennedy-Panda and her sister co-own a Bay Area solar business started by their father in the 1980s. She says the regulations—and fees—change constantly: “Permitting a solar-battery system even recently was $200, and now it can cost three or four thousand dollars. There’s not a whole lot of clarity we can give our customers.”

Even installing appliances that in some jurisdictions have become pretty standard can be a bureaucratic rat nest in the Bay Area. Consider electric heat pumps, which replace gas or oil furnaces and are an easy way to cut both energy use and emissions. Getting them permitted is onerous in many Bay Area cities, building decarbonization policy expert Sam Fishman says. Gas furnaces and water heaters are greenlit quickly because building departments are used to them, but put a heat pump water heater in a garage, and you might be subject to requirements that really only make sense for gas appliances, such as raising it on a stand or installing bollards to make sure a car can’t run into it. “There’s an assumption that things need to be done in a perfect, buttoned-up way,” he says. “Checking too many things and going through so much process only adds the most tiny margin of safety and health improvement and is actually costing thousands of dollars.”

One possibility is that America will simply sit out the global solar boom in the same way Cubans, thanks to endless embargoes, still drive ’57 Chevys.

The extra costs are high enough that many locals install heat pump appliances without pulling permits—but the rebate programs for low-income residents, who benefit the most from these money-saving appliances, all require copies. The problem has reached the point where the California legislature is weighing a “heat pump access act” to standardize and streamline permitting.

All this red tape might be necessary if it were in response to some epidemic of fires caused by badly installed solar panels. But that epidemic doesn’t exist—not in Australia, not in Germany, not in California. I’ve spent some of my life as a volunteer firefighter, and I can tell you what causes blazes: not heat pumps or solar panels but space heaters, which are what many poor people use to heat their homes. Think about California, where big gas explosions have caused carnage, and whose massive wildfires are clearly linked to global warming—against which solar panels are the best weapon. Even worse, the sparks that set off these blazes often come from drooping utility transmission lines brushing up against dry foliage—whereas more rooftop solar means fewer new peaker plants and dangerous transmission lines. “We’re over-indexing certain kinds of fire prevention,” Cotter says. “The individual house versus the mass catastrophe. We feel much more comfortable piping natural gas, which we ignite to cook our foods and heat our homes. We know it’s not safe for our planet, nor for the people around it that have to breathe the fumes. But we’re okay doing that because we’ve been doing it for 100 years.”

If all of this sounds like a place where an anti-regulatory right might find common ground with an environmentally minded left, well, there are signs of it happening. The deep-red Utah legislature this past winter became the first in the country to allow balcony solar. In the Southeast, a group called Conservatives for Clean Energy has pushed Republican legislators forward on solar power. Its biggest victory came in Florida, where it helped convince Gov. Ron DeSantis to veto anti-solar legislation—in the three years since, the Sunshine State has seen a respectable boom in solar installations. “That allowed us to say, ‘Here’s a Republican governor who helped us save rooftop solar,’” says Mark Fleming, head of CCE and a former aide to former Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.). The group focuses on economic arguments—in many rural counties in the Southeast, solar projects are among the biggest taxpayers—but especially when it comes to rooftop solar, its case is partly ideological. “There’s a private property rights thing—an ‘I’ll do what I want on my land’ kind of argument,” Fleming says.

Polling has long found that solar power is popular across the political spectrum. My sense, having lived most of my life in dirt-road districts, both red and blue, is that conservatives are often deeply attracted to the idea of producing their own power. If you have your own energy source up on the shingles, then your home really is your castle. But unless you absolutely reject government authority, you still need those permits. One of Fleming’s board members at CCE, Stew Miller, has run a solar installation company in North Carolina’s Research Triangle for 16 years. “Raleigh has instant permitting, which is great,” he said. “But other jurisdictions want us to take 100 photos, even though they may only look at four or five of them. When you’re up on a roof and it’s 95 degrees and they want a picture of every single panel—it gets to be very tedious. Our crews just resent it.”

Right now, the world wants to go solar—but the Trump administration is bucking that trend. A few weeks before the November election, Trump declared that solar was “all steel and glass and wires and looks like hell.” (Somewhat mystifyingly, he added, “And you see rabbits, they get caught in it.”)

One possibility is that America will simply sit out the global solar boom in the same way Cubans, thanks to endless embargoes, still drive ’57 Chevys. Perhaps, having self-embargoed from the clean energy future, America will someday be a living museum of coal-fired power plants and basement furnaces.

If we aren’t going to be left behind, we’re going to have to push. Engineers and scientists have done their job, dropping the price of clean energy 90 percent in a decade. Now environmentalists, entrepreneurs, YIMBYs, advocates for clean air, and local communities have our own job to do: convincing everyone else that rooftop solar is no longer “alternative” energy. As costs have plummeted, solar has gone from being the Whole Foods of energy to the Costco of power—available in bulk, on the shelf, and cheap in most of the world.

If you’re feeling helpless against the administration’s attacks on the environment, you might want to join a big fall day of action, Sun Day, which will celebrate clean power, and push for solutions like SolarAPP+. We need to take on utilities, shake up the public utility commissions, and start to get Congress back on the side of the future. I’m hoping that a nationwide celebration of clean energy might prompt the same kind of momentum we’ve seen from housing advocates over the last few years, who’ve made headway pushing for zoning codes to finally be reformed. “We’ve got the hardware solved,” says OpenSolar’s Andrew Birch. “We’ve got the sunshine. Now it’s all about getting rid of the friction.”