Tag: solar

Operational Excellence in Solar Projects

Orange Button AHJ Registry and Solar Product Registry

Post author By Andrew
Post date April 21, 2023

EXECUTIVE TALK SERIES:

How the AHJ Registry and the Solar Product Registry Are Making It Easier For Solar Installers To Deploy More Solar Faster

Jan Rippingale – Founder & CEO of Blu Banyan, talks about how the AHJ Registry helped minimize permitting application errors and shares the vision for the new Solar Product Registry, and how it will make life easier for solar installers when it comes to managing their inventory.

Why this is important:

In the U.S., there are over 18,000 permitting jurisdictions and 3,000 utilities with different rules and regulations for how to go solar. The most critical question solar installers have is: “I have an address. Which AHJ does it belong to?“.

The Orange Button AHJ Registry provides the ability to automatically assign AHJs, thereby eliminating human error and further streamlines solar installers’ pre-installation process. This is a game changer.

The Orange Button Solar Product Registry is a new dataset that provides a single source of truth for what is the product. It makes life easier for solar installers to only be able to maintain the right amount of detail about the products in their inventory or for which they need to order, thereby minimizing ordering or inventory management errors.

Both of these datasets are part of the solar industry-wide digital transformation that will deliver:

1. higher productivity in solar installers’ business,

2. more bandwidth to take on more projects,

3. increase access to capital, and

4. lower soft costs to deliver higher profits.

Full Transcript

SolarSuccess Newsletter:

How to scale your solar business faster and more profitably.

Download the SolarSuccess Product Brochure

Full transcript:

Today we’re going to talk about the US Department of Energy’s Orange Button Initiative and the common data sets. This was the key piece that we needed in order to get the adoption that is really making all the difference in the world. This is why we need an entire energy information infrastructure, not simply common data terms. So, let’s talk about the common data sets that we have so far and how they’re going to expand.

The NEW Energy Information Infrastructure:

First, in order to have the entire energy infrastructure, you need common terms, which has a common language with units and completely defined terms. You need common data sets. This is the candy. This is the thing that every business owner out there wants in their hands as quickly as possible.

This is the key to make this digital transformation really happen, and I’m so excited to share it with you today. And then all of these pulled together for common tools across the industry, which is where we finally get the momentum that we’ve always wanted from this digital transformation. And of course, everything needs to be secure.

So why do we do this? First, we need to drive down those soft costs. We need to drive down the cost of doing business so that we’re able to put our money and our resources towards actually building the infrastructure that we need for residential, commercial, and utility solar projects. So, the easy data exchange gives us this ability to instantly share data without the time-consuming manual data entry and validation.

That lowers project costs all by itself, but it also reduces the timeline, which further reduces the cost. Then this foundation is extensible for new technologies so that we are future-proofed and we are able to move forward and continue to absorb innovation quickly and effectively into our businesses.

Let’s start with the AHJ Registry.

The AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) Registry was released in 2021, and has been available for over a year. It is utilized by many large companies to the extent that we’ve had multiple Google outages and shut downs and had to get those all back up really quick. We had to get our infrastructure scaled because it is used by so many companies at this point in time.

The problem that we were solving is that the AHJs in the United States are very fragmented. As you can see from this picture of Houston, which is in the red versus the purple of Harris County, it is very difficult, even for somebody who did have great tribal knowledge and a lot of experience in selecting their AHJ, it is very difficult for them to know whether they’re in the city of Houston or Harris County, simply because of the complexity of the gerrymandering that has occurred over the years in Houston.

It is really not an easy thing to know which AHJ and which permitting authority you’re supposed you’re supposed to use. So that was literally the single question we were looking to answer. And what we did to pull this together is we found that the Census Bureau already produces polygon data of all of the AHJs.

So, we had complete polygons and there’s technology that draws this so that you can see it. And then we’ve got all these spaces in between that are anti polygons that are not included, and we are able to pull all this together into a conceptual polygon and use a latitude-longitude point from Google, which is just your geolocation coordinates, and compare this with the polygon and find that point inside.

This was a challenge to put this together, but it was coming from existing technologies and existing tools. The Census Bureau has been putting out this polygon data for decades, and Google has had latitude-longitude returns on maps for a decade. So, these tools had been in place, but they didn’t get put together in a way that was commonly accessible until we had the AHJ Registry.

So, a simple question. I have an address, which AHJ does it belong to, was what we were looking to answer.

Let me show you how the AHJ Registry works….

Let’s take a look at this result that you’ll get. And if you look at this in detail, you’ll see that the city of Houston has a very different building code, electric code and fire code that is substantially and materially different than Harris County.

So, if you’re doing solar and it needs to be roof constrained, you are going to need to conform to different specifications based on where you are in which AHJ you’re going to get to. It makes a material difference in your design if it’s 2012 versus 2018.

And over time we are expecting that the AHJs will come to a common set of building codes and standards. But this is going to take time and, in the meantime, we need to get the information right and do it right the first time. So, this is how we’re moving forward. It makes a material difference and you have to know. It saves time, reduces errors and lowers costs.

How did we validate that we actually had the right AHJ information?

We were working with NREL (The National Renewable Energy Laboratory) and they are the national labs interested in how accurate this data is. So, we actually back tested with 17,500 residential solar projects that had manually been assigned the AHJs and had permits approved for them.

So, we had the human assigned versus the AHJ registry assigned AHJs to see how we did it.
And we did it across these eight states, which are the bulk of the states in the sunbelt, where we’re interested in the solar impact.

So, we had about 670 AHJs, and what we found is that we had 98.5% identical matches. So, it absolutely works. It’s statistically significant. All of it is fabulous.

And how come it wasn’t a hundred percent? What didn’t work?

We went back and we looked at these 257 manual misses, and what we found is that we had some where the human assigned data that was in the database wasn’t actually the same as what was on the permit. So, the permit was actually issued from the correct AHJ, but what the human had assigned the AHJ that had gotten issued from was wrong.

So, we had just plain old data entry errors. Then we had somewhere where the zip code didn’t match any particular city, and so the zip codes had changed over the time period that we had the historical data. But the most interesting and fun one was when the AHJ registry had assigned the city and county to the correct AHJ, but both the humans and the city or county had assigned the wrong AHJ.

We literally had permits issued to homeowners from the wrong AHJ, that both the human doing the permitting on the solar installer side, and the AHJ thought was right at the time, but didn’t actually match when you looked at the map. So that was funny that both sides, even the counties doing the assignment did not know that they weren’t really allowed to assign our initial permit for those residents.

So, those were the 257 mis-matches. We ended up really feeling much stronger that we needed to have this done automatically rather than manually, when we were done evaluating the misses.

Titan Solar Power was, was a first mover using this initially, and they said that “the ability to automatically assign AHJs eliminates human error, and it streamlines our pre-installation process. This allows the teams to potentially install solar systems quicker and ultimately achieve our end goal of a completed project and a happy customer.”

So, getting the project done faster was a massive win for Titan Solar with no human intervention, no ongoing training as they scale on how to do this. It is just a relief to have it done right, for sure, the first time.

Next, and we just added this in – The Product Registry.

I’m so excited. The industry needs a single source of truth for what is the product.

So why hasn’t this been done before? Why wasn’t this done before the AHJ registry, which involved all this funky polygon math? And there’s some really interesting reasons why it hasn’t happened until just now.

And the challenge is that the different industry players need different levels of details. What different constituencies in the solar industry are willing to substitute for products versus insisting that they get exactly one particular product, has made this a very complex question because if you get too much detail, it’s too hard to maintain and manage and it doesn’t work for smaller or even, you know, reasonably size solar companies. Even large solar companies that gets too much detail.

And so, we had to figure out how to solve this.

So, what we ended up doing is we’re providing different views of the product registry. What’s in the product registry as a whole, is the full manufacturer SKU. It’s the full detail for every single product.

So, if you’ve got a Q-Cell 400, built by Hanwha, you can have five of them that are black-on-black, and five of them that might be silver. And you can see the full detail of everything that’s in there.

But what we’re going to use is, we have a group-by-API mechanism, and what we’re going to use in that grouping API for the installers, is a simplified level of detail.

They would see something like Hanwha-400-Black, and then be able to substitute all the fives, and they’ll just take the first one as what it is that they’re looking for when they place their orders to a distributor of the manufacturer. And then they’ll just explicitly say, any of these five qualify. And I’m, I’m not really concerned about what it is, as long as you can meet pricing constraints.

And that way we’ve got the right level, like a sweet spot of the level of detail the installer needs to manage when they’re receiving and attributing products to a specific job. They need to do it at this higher, simplified level of detail so that the warehouse and the inventory can all stay aligned, and we’re still giving clear instruction to the distributor/manufacturer about what is a valid and acceptable substitution, so that we can make sure that we can get supplied at the right time with what they have on hand.

So, changing what is the full detail on the product registry to a simplified detail for the solar installer, because the installers do not want that full detail, was a key element of changing how this works.

Then the government, like the CEC (the California Energy Commission), needs even a lower level of detail. They are working at things like the Hanwha 400. They just want to see that this product line in general has the required certifications. And so, it’s getting referenced and CEC listed based on even a simpler view of what is available for that product.

And so, by accommodating all of these in a way that we can work with them automatically, and get the full detail where you need it was the solution that we needed to get the product registry actually adopted and generally referenced by a broader audience.

So, this has resolved our need for common language. It is relatively simple and took a little while to think about it, and a lot of consensus building to get everyone to understand how they play together.

The data that we’ve got in here includes the CEC list, and we’re starting with these five – products, module, inverter, battery, energy storage system, and meter.

And this is where you can see the certification that will be entered by the certifying agency. The product information is going to be entered by the manufacturer. The certifications are going to be done by the certifying agencies – NRTL, SunSpec, UL. And the CEC listing date is going to be coming from the CEC.

Then we’ll have the common products and the details and you can view more and more details, and see exactly what is in our current module definition. Everything that’s in the CEC is in there – the CEC list and more.

So, we should start to have a common language for better design capabilities across the industry and fewer siloed areas, and also common utilization of data maintenance talent.

And then here you can see the additional detail that becomes available, including units.

So, in summary, this is the new energy information infrastructure and it is the common data sets piece of this affects the entire industry. Every single one of the players is affected by having these common data sets available. So, everyone industry-wide is benefiting from making this available, and hopefully everyone industry-wide is going to contribute to creating this better world for all of us, going for forward, so that we can deploy more solar faster.

Thank you.

Tags solar

Blog

SolarAPP+, the New Normal

Post author By JaclynH
Post date April 20, 2023

This article has been featured in the March-April issue of the North American Clean Energy Magazine.

The standardization of the solar industry is crucial to its success. With a push towards cleaner, greener energy sources, ensuring a common data standard for all participants will allow the solar industry to achieve its potential, providing benefits to society as a whole.

One way to help standardize data and enable process automation in the solar industry is through the use of Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus. SolarAPP+ is an online permitting platform that helps streamline the permitting process for solar projects. The platform includes a library of standard permit templates that can be used by jurisdictions across the United States.

Improving solar permitting is a collaborative effort. This work is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy; the DOE’s Orange Button Working Group seeks to create a commonly accepted data structure to aid in the development of solar industry applications, in an effort to ease the process of integration through this standardization. NREL is working with a variety of partners to deliver the SolarAPP+ online platform. The platform was created to help address the permitting challenges faced by solar installers and developers, aiming to decrease the amount of time and complexity that inherently exists in the current fractured permitting processes used across thousands of Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs).

To date, SolarAPP+ has been used to streamline the permitting process for thousands of solar installation projects. The platform has also been recognized by the DOE as a Best Practice for Solar Permitting — they are actively promoting and incentivizing adoption through programs such as the SolarAPP+ Prize, which rewards AHJ’s with up to $15,000 to lower the cost of adopting SolarAPP+.

How SolarAPP+ Works

SolarAPP+ provides local governments and AHJs with a standardized permit application portal for receiving and processing information for residential and commercial solar storage systems. The standardizations can be incorporated into the existing processes and procedures currently used by approval authorities. The technology can assist approvers with electronically reviewing the relevant safety and building code compliance requirements. If all checks are in order, authorities can instantly approve applications, lessening the burden of manually reviewing applications.

The app also gives applicants access to a streamlined application submission form that includes all of the required information for a permit application. After an application has been submitted, applicants receive notifications on the status of their application via email or text.

Is SolarAPP+ Mandatory?

Solar Access Act SB 379, which passed on August 24, 2022, mandates the use of SolarAPP+, or a similar type of online permitting tool, for California counties with over 150,000 residents. It is hoped that this legislation will pave the way for more states to introduce similar mandates, in an effort to improve the solar application process countrywide.

In other states, the use of SolarAPP+ is voluntary, but SEIA and NREL encourage its use. SEIA also offers a free SolarAPP+ Training Academy to help jurisdictions and developers learn how to use the platform. In the future, SolarAPP+ aims to be the gold standard when it comes to solar permit approval processes and hopes to achieve 100 percent penetration across every state.

What are the benefits of using SolarAPP+?

Time Saving

The SolarAPP+ platform can save developers time by providing access to a library of pre-approved permit templates. This can help to reduce time spent on the permitting process, from months down to days, in some cases.

Decreased Costs

By using SolarAPP+, developers can avoid having to hire third-party consultants and expediters to manage the solar permit application process. This will help to decrease costs associated with the permitting process.

Increased Efficiency

SolarAPP+ can streamline the permitting process by automating many of the tasks that are typically carried out manually, such as collecting signatures, sending notifications, and generating reports.

Improved Accuracy

SolarAPP+ can help improve the accuracy and avoid delays of solar permits by ensuring that all required information is captured and validated before the permit application is submitted.

Standardization is Critical to the Success of Our National Climate Change Action Plan

The United States has committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025, as part of the Paris Climate Agreement. In order to achieve this goal, it is critical that the solar industry is standardized to remove unnecessary roadblocks and red tape, allowing for greater and faster uptake of clean energy solutions.

Solar energy is a key component of our national climate change action plan. It is a clean, renewable resource that can help us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and meet our climate change goals. SolarAPP+ is an important tool that can help us to achieve these goals adding a level of sophistication and simplicity that has never been seen before at scale.

Partnering with All Stakeholders

In order to achieve its goal of 100 percent penetration across the United States, SolarAPP+ is partnering with all industry stakeholders, including:

Solar Technology Developers and Manufacturers
Solar Installers and Contractors
Utility Companies
Investor-Owned Utilities (IOUs)
Electric Cooperatives (co-ops)
Public Utility Commissions (PUCs)

The Future is SolarAPP+

The solar industry is booming, and is expected to continue to grow exponentially in the coming years. SolarAPP+ is leading the way in simplifying and streamlining the solar permitting process, making it easier than ever for developers to get their projects off the ground. In the future, SolarAPP+ aims to be the go-to platform for all solar permit applications.

The author is Jaclyn Haynes, Marketing Manager at Blu Banyan, a technology consulting firm that specializes in developing custom software solutions for the solar industry using NetSuite- a cloud-based business management platform. We have a team of experienced developers and solar industry experts who are passionate about building innovative applications that make a difference to our world.

Tags solar

Blog

NEM 3.0 and What Solar Installers Should Do to Prepare for It

Post author By JaclynH
Post date April 3, 2023

Given the potential impacts of NEM 3.0 on solar installations, here are a few key steps installers can take.

NEM 3.0 is a new set of rules for net energy metering in California that will take effect in 2023. The new rules will gradually reduce the credit rate that solar customers receive for any excess energy they generate, from the current retail rate to the wholesale rate over a period of five years. The new rules will also introduce a fixed monthly charge for solar customers, regardless of how much energy they use from the grid.

So, how will NEM 3.0 affect solar installers? Firstly, the reduction in the credit rate could make solar less financially attractive to customers, which could lead to a slowdown in the growth of solar installations. Additionally, the fixed monthly charge could make solar less competitive compared to traditional grid energy, which could further reduce demand for solar installations.

Given the potential impacts of NEM 3.0 on solar installations, what should solar installers do to prepare for it? Here are a few key steps they can take:

Reduce soft costs – protect and grow margins: Solar installers should consider using streamlined cloud-based end-to-end business management or ERP software to streamline their operations and cut soft costs. By doing so, they can increase productivity, reduce errors and delays, manage cashflow in real-time, and ultimately protect and grow margins, helping them remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market.
Educate customers: Solar installers should educate their customers about the changes coming with NEM 3.0 with focus on long-term value. The increase in costs for electricity will only go upward while the need for energy will also follow-suit, especially given the demand and direction of EVs. It would still benefit the customers to focus on effectively thinking about their energy needs connected to the value and impact of solar that is tailored to their needs.
Focus on efficiency: With the reduction in the credit rate, solar installers should focus on improving the efficiency of their installations to maximize the amount of energy they generate. This can help offset the reduction in credit rate and make solar more financially attractive to customers.
Continue to offer energy storage solutions: With the fixed monthly charge, solar installers should also consider continuing to offer energy storage solutions to their customers. The demand for storage is based on needs which will only continue to increase with the use of EVs and other demands on electricity. Energy storage can help customers reduce their reliance on the grid and offset the fixed monthly charge, making solar more competitive.
Stay up-to-date: Solar installers should stay up-to-date with the latest developments related to NEM 3.0, including any potential changes or updates to the rules. This will help them adjust their strategies and offerings accordingly.

NEM 3.0 represents a significant change to net energy metering in California and will have important implications for solar installers.

Blu Banyan’s SolarSuccess platform is built for solar installers to help them overcome the challenges posed by NEM 3.0 and beyond. SolarSuccess is a end-to-end business management cloud-based SaaS platform that is native to Oracle’s NetSuite, and is tailored for Solar Installers to scale and grow their business.

If you would like to learn more about how SolarSuccess can optimize your solar business, explore the modules or schedule a 15 minute chat with our team.

Tags solar

Blog

Why Are Solar Installers Concerned About NEM 3.0?

Post author By JaclynH
Post date March 28, 2023

Net Energy Metering (NEM) 3.0 is the latest version of a policy that is being developed and implemented by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which is a government agency responsible for regulating utilities and implementing energy policies in California. The policy governs how customers with rooftop solar panels are credited for the excess energy they generate and feed back into the grid. Naturally, solar installers have concerns that NEM 3.0 will result in decreased incentives for customers to install solar panels and therefore cause a reduced demand for their services.

The changes in NEM 3.0 aim to address the costs associated with interconnecting and maintaining the grid, which are currently borne by all utility customers, including those without solar panels. However, the changes may also affect how solar customers are compensated for the excess energy they generate and send back to the grid. This would result in lower credits for excess energy generated by rooftop solar panels, reducing the financial incentive for customers to install them. Additionally, the implementation of new fees and charges for interconnecting and maintaining the grid could also make solar systems less affordable for customers, further reducing future demand for solar installations.

On the other hand, some solar customers and installers may feel a sense of urgency to complete solar projects before the policy changes take effect, leading to rushed demand to get solar projects sold. There are several factors that could influence the behavior of solar customers and installers leading up to the implementation of NEM 3.0. For example, some customers may have been planning to install solar panels regardless of the policy changes, while others may be waiting to see how the policy changes will affect the economics of solar energy.

In a follow-up blog, we will share some thoughts on how Solar Installers should better prepare for NEM 3.0.

If you would like to learn more about how SolarSuccess can optimize your solar business, explore the modules or schedule a 15 minute chat with our team.

Tags solar

Operational Excellence in Solar Projects

Driving Operational Excellence to Deploy More Solar Faster

Post author By Andrew
Post date March 12, 2023

Driving Operational Excellence to Deploy More Solar Faster

The solar PV industry is set for exponential growth. However, solar installer business owners are facing challenging headwinds with recessionary trends, supply chain bottlenecks, labor shortages, and government regulations like NEM 3.0, that are threatening their survival and growth.

Jan Rippingale – Founder & CEO and the team at Blu Banyan are leading the way to ease these growth pains with innovative solutions to enable residential, commercial, community, and utility-scale solar installers to mitigate these challenges to their business, grow faster, and more profitably.

In these Executive Talk series, we will be addressing the various challenges and our solutions for mitigating them.

Why this is important:

This presentation highlights the initiatives driven by the US Department of Energy to enable residential, commercial, community, and utility-scale solar installers to deploy more solar faster, and more profitably.

It is important that solar installers understand this industry wide digital transformation that will deliver:

1. higher productivity in your business,

2. more bandwidth to take on more projects,

3. increase access to capital, and

4. lower soft costs to deliver higher profits.

Full Transcript

SolarSuccess Newsletter:

How to scale your solar business faster and more profitably.

Download the SolarSuccess Product Brochure

Full transcript:

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Tags solar

Operational Excellence in Solar Projects

The New Solar Energy Information Infrastructure

Post author By Andrew
Post date March 11, 2023

EXECUTIVE TALK SERIES:

The Importance & Impact of the New Energy Information Infrastructure for Solar Installers

Jan Rippingale – Founder & CEO of Blu Banyan, talks about the importance and impact of the US Department of Energy’s Orange Button Data Standard, and how it is fueling the future of solar with faster deployment and higher profitability for installers.

Why this is important:

It is important that solar installers understand this industry wide digital transformation that will deliver:

1. higher productivity in their business,

2. more bandwidth to take on more projects,

3. increase access to capital, and

4. lower soft costs to deliver higher profits.

Full Transcript

SolarSuccess Newsletter:

How to scale your solar business faster and more profitably.

Download the SolarSuccess Product Brochure

Full transcript:

I am Jan Rippingale, the founder and CEO of Blu Banyan, and today I’m going to talk about the new energy information infrastructure, starting with the United States Department of Energy’s Orange Button open data standard. This is an absolutely essential concept. It effectively is the wiring in the walls for us to do a digital transformation for the solar industry. I think everyone is going to enjoy the new information.

So why do we need to do this?

The United States residential solar PV market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 15.4%. This growth rate is tremendous and huge. It is absolutely what we want and need to affect climate change and the stress and the strain on supply chain and labor costs and system development and accounting is tremendous. This needs to get automated and harmonized so that all of the innovations can diffuse quickly throughout the entire ecosystem of solar installers, so that we can do this successfully at quality and scale

We are set up for massive growth since 2000, but in 2022 we had a substantial setback with our supply chain problems that have been significantly offset by the Inflation Reduction Act, which is going to kick in a little bit in 2023 and then substantially over the next five years. So, we are expecting tremendous growth in this industry absolutely worth everyone’s time in learning how to do this, and it is only going to get harder to do it later. As you scale and develop new systems, the sooner that you do it, the sooner you gain the benefits. As you scale even more in subsequent years, you reap all those benefits of having the clarity that you defined initially to get going.

So, in order to reach the 40% of the US electricity demand that has been put out there as the goal for the Biden administration for the solar industry, this is what we would need to do to meet the United States requirements for the Paris Climate Accord.

In order to meet that goal for 40% supply by 2035 and 45% by 2050, this is how much solar we have to deploy. We need to double the amount of installed solar between now and 2025, so that’s an average of 30 gigawatts per year, and we need to make up for our miss in 2022, and then we need to double it again between 2025 and 2030 to 60 gigawatts a year on average.

This is a tremendous amount of solar to install, and it’s going to take the entire ecosystem to do this at quality and speed that is required. So, the pace of this change demands new approaches and technologies. If we think about this, and you look at the oil and gas industry, they took 120 years to build this level of infrastructure, and we are going to do it substantially in a decade, and then we’re going to do it again, and again.

So, the only way to compress that amount of change requires new approaches and new technology. This is how and why we are so committed to the digital transformation of the solar PV industry.

The US Department of Energy started the Orange Button Initiative and it is specifically meant to drive down soft costs for residential, commercial, and utility scale projects.

The players that are actively engaged are Blu Banyan and Sandia National Labs. We are co-leading the working group.

The SunSpec Alliance had the initial implementation and was a grant recipient from the Department of Energy and continues to be actively involved. And then, over time, we’ve got other industry players that are making this happen.

You’ll notice that it is financing companies and software companies who are driving this innovation and all of the installers are going to benefit from having better software and better pricing on their financing by doing this. There are several pieces that we’re going to talk about in the taxonomy working group. And to be totally transparent, we started with just the taxonomy definitions, the main things that we needed to have common terms for agreeing with each other about what needed to be the universally defined terms to move forward and speak apples to apples to each other.

And what we found is that we needed to extend that to the reference data sets and then common tools. So, this started as a smaller group with a smaller scope, but the scope has enhanced and the group expanded substantially.

So, the Orange Button Initiative, this is the original data set and the key players. Blu Banyan was the lead developer of the Orange Button Working group, working with all of these software companies – Enerflo, Aurora, Ecogy Energy, to deliver and integrate with SolarSuccess, the software specifically for solar installers to run their business. And we need each of these specialty software companies to interface with and integrate with in a harmonized way.

NREL and ddditional government agencies are also producing tools like SolarAPP+ to automate permitting. So, these players together are working on this initiative to actively make it a reality for the entire industry.

So, what is the energy information infrastructure?

As I mentioned, when we started out, we thought this would be enough that we could have the Orange Button as a data standard, and it would take off somewhat like SCORM or XBRL or the Financial Data Exchange.

SCORM is the standard utilized for learning management systems, to enable you to send educational materials across from any company and be displayed in other software.

XBRL has been successfully implemented to take all of the SEC’s financial data across 30,000 publicly traded companies over the last decade and a half at this point. And they have successfully got all of these disparate companies to speak in a common language so that the SEC can compare and contrast the different business opportunities for all investors.

An FDX is used to interface specifically with the banks. Every time you use an ATM, you’re using an FDX exchange.

So, these common terms in those definitions are very powerful and have made industry-wide changes in the past.

We thought this would be enough, but we were wrong.

We also need common data sets with the AHJ Registry and the Product Registry being the first ones that we have pulled in together. These common data sets are solving particular problems for everyone and have been the primary driver of adoption for the energy information infrastructure.

I’m going to talk about these two in depth in subsequent talks.

With these common terms and common data sets, we have begun to build tools used for the entire industry that are also in common. This is enabling substantial and tremendously leveraged change for the entire solar industry.

And the permitting changes that I see in SolarAPP+, I am expecting are going to end up driving how our permitting is done in construction in general in the United States of America, bringing that area of our industry up to the 21st century.

And of course, all of this has to be wrapped in cybersecurity protocols.

So, this is the energy information infrastructure that we need that is working, that is driving adoption and making game-changing systemic shifts at scale. This is what we are bringing to the solar industry and the first adopters will experience the advantages sooner, and eventually everyone is going to need to move to the new model in order to compete because it is such a substantially significant improvement in operational efficiency.

So, what are common terms? Why do we have these?

In the Orange Button Initiative, the primary interest in having common terms is that we need to have easy data exchange. Very much like you need the wiring in your walls to work a specific way, you’ve got color codes, you’ve got ways of making connections. There are a tremendous number of standards involved in specifically what you need to do to wire up a house.

In the same way we need the same data exchange standards defined so that we can wire up our software to talk to each other well. This reduces project costs. We lower the project costs because we are speaking the same language. We understand each other the first time. Everything is clear and crisp as we move through the lifecycle expected, and so we can get the easy handoffs that you would expect from qualified electricians, for instance. And it enables us to extend for new technologies, just like the electricians have extended their knowledge about main panel upgrades in PV to include storage, and they are fundamentally operating on the exact same vocabulary and the same principles.

By having these common terms defined in the Orange Button standard, software is able to extend from that common foundation and move forward as we move into the Internet of Things (IoT), electric vehicle charging, and the many, many smart housing optimizations that are here and coming.

What exactly makes the Orange Button open API work versus any others? What is it that we needed to do to have this be coherent and compare apples to apples?

So, I’m going to dive in just a minute to show you what we needed to do. If you’ve got any experience merging Excel data sets, you will recognize the value of having a fully defined term right from the beginning. And fundamentally, this is the key innovation of the Orange Button API that is then brought forth and utilized across each of the terms and elements specifically.

But what we are doing is we are fully defining EnergyAC, for instance, and that makes it able to have the field of value and the units are included, right with that energy unit. Start time and end time are for production and decimals and precision. By pulling in this information together, particularly the units, we’re able to have the same energy measurements work for the Internet of Things (IoT) where you’re just doing watts based on the lights that go through the walkway that are motion triggered, and you can see how long they were on for, and you can plan and organize and optimize intelligently based on having a completely defined unit there.

You can do this in kilowatt hours if you’re doing a residential home or megawatt hours for utility scale implementation. And the same energy AC unit, because it’s a fully defined term will work to describe what has happened historically and what’s going to happen now and what’s going to happen in the future so that we can compare and contrast and learn from each other, which is where our biggest innovations are going to come.

So, these common terms results in us having a completely defined term, which is why Orange Button works. This is the core as everything as you would expect, just like where you were wiring up the walls, it actually comes down to a few simplicities. But having this complete term is the key simplicity for the Orange Button, common terminology.

Blu Banyan is leading this initiative, but who is playing?

So, we built SolarSuccess, which is the award-winning business management software that supports residential, commercial, and utility scale solar installers and developers. We have over 50 companies, including the top three residential solar contractors in the US on SolarSuccess, and more than 33% of the top 100 residential solar installations in 2022 is already on SolarSuccess and utilizing it.

Our clients have on average gained 50% higher operational efficiencies by having a single source of data from project management and accounting.

SolarSuccess has the core elements of running a solar company, and we recognize that our clients want and need to hook up with specialty software that are optimized for particular areas like lead generation with GetTheReferral.com and dialers, proposals, signatures, financiers.

Each of these areas are partners that have their software of their own, and we are able to hook up our clients to these software tools, so they are able to function much more efficiently and harmonized.

By bringing in the property data directly to the project, you will know the assessor parcel number for the project, and don’t have to go and spend the five to 10 minutes to look it up on the website for the county. You just know it automatically and can move forward to the next step when setting up your design and permitting documentation.

Customer engagement, file services, warehouse management, equipment, distributors, other connecting systems, Department of Energy tools, monitoring systems, asset management, field service.

Thus, you can see there’s a lot of specialty players in the solar installation market, and we want to be able to bring them in, harmonize their data right up front so they’re actively engaged in the workflows so that we have that optimal operational efficiency internal to the solar company and across all of their partners.

And you can see that the Orange Button is starting to flow across multiple areas of these software vendors. It’s very exciting.

These are the common tools that we are applying to address the soft costs breakdown and improve these operational efficiencies.

Reducing soft costs is actually our metric, so it is really tough. All of the different pieces need to work together well and consistently in order for these soft costs to really go down.

These are the different technologies and tools that we hook up with that you can see reduce each particular area to reduce these soft costs.

So having common terms really does help the entire industry across the entire cost stack to improve its level of play. Everyone benefits from having the common terms and the digital transformation for the industry.

And those of you on SolarSuccess are benefiting now, and those of you who come soon will benefit sooner than everyone else who’s going to follow.

So here is everyone that’s benefiting to date. Blu Banyan is all focused on the solar installers. We see the solar installers as the primary mover, increasing the capacity to get the job done, to deploy more solar faster, and everybody else around the circle is supporting them to make our solar energy infrastructure a reality.

So, data harmonization, integration, and automation will help us to deploy more solar faster.

Our number one metric for that is that higher productivity – you have accurate data through standard formats and with seamless integrations you get more revenue per employee – you can run more jobs, you can do more projects with fewer people on the backend who do the job.

The client experience is better and the company is better. You sleep better at night. It is the world we all want to go to. This also increases the bandwidth so that you can complete more projects faster. And when you are doing that, you could actually take on more projects and retain the same staffing levels and just get those projects done. The same number of staff can handle more projects. And that in makes everyone excited.

You get more sales, it’s a very virtuous loop to lead to growth and scalability.

The third major piece of this is that you get more financing and better financing. By operating on these data standards where we have complete terms that are defined and the clarity that the financing companies need to know that their dollars are not at risk.

Every step of this that we do, that automates and builds up to scale and to standards where you can demonstrate that you’re consistently meeting those standards, you get better financing and it reduces the cost for the homeowner. And you simply get more jobs done, better use of resources altogether.

And this is where you get the higher return on investment. Lowering soft cost delivers tremendous ROI for solar businesses, enabling the tremendous benefits of unit economics being optimized. So, the number of projects that you can run and what the cost are in those projects are known, clarified, and then harmonized as you go through and optimized across each of these areas.

It’s fun, exciting, and makes you rich. What isn’t there to love?

What we’re going to talk about next is how to improve your project execution, specifically with the AHJ Registry, the Solar Product Registry, what it is and why we need it, and then how we’re tying both of those together to give you the SolarAPP+ integration and automation so that we can take the 27-56 days permit times and make them one day and then eventually, 30 minute permit applications.

That is the vision. So, lots of exciting things coming forward, and I want everyone to understand the foundation and the fundamental wiring that enables us to discuss these innovations with credibility.

Thank you.

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Articles Blog Solar

Accelerating Solar Permitting with SolarAPP+, the Future of Solar Industry Standardization

Post author By JaclynH
Post date November 9, 2022

Streamlining Solar Permitting with SolarAPP+, the Future of Solar Industry Standardization

Improving solar permitting is a collaborative effort. This work is supported by funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. NREL is working with a variety of partners, including those listed here, to deliver the SolarAPP+ online platform. The platform was created to help address the permitting challenges that solar installers and developers face, with the aim of decreasing the amount of time and complexity that inherently exists in the current fractured permitting processes used across thousands of AHJs (Authorities Having Jurisdiction).

To date, SolarAPP+ has been used to streamline the permitting process for thousands of solar installation projects. The platform has also been recognized by the Department of Energy as a Best Practice for Solar Permitting, and they are actively promoting and incentivizing adoption through programs such as the SolarAPP+ Prize, which rewards AHJs with up to $15,000 to lower the cost of adopting SolarAPP+.

How SolarAPP+ Works

SolarAPP+ provides local governments and Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs) with a standardized permit application portal for receiving and processing information for residential and commercial solar storage systems. The standardizations can be incorporated into the existing processes and procedures currently used by approval authorities. The technology can assist approvers with electronically reviewing the relevant safety and building code compliance requirements. If all checks are in order, authorities can instantly approve applications, lessening the burden of manually reviewing applications.

The app also gives applicants access to a streamlined application submission form that includes all of the required information for a permit application. After an application has been submitted, applicants will receive updates and notifications on the status of their application via email or text message.

Is SolarAPP+ Mandatory?

On the 24th August, 2022 the Solar Access Act. SB 379, which mandates the use of SolarAPP+ or a similar type of online permitting tool, for California counties with over 150,000 residents. It is hoped that this legislation will pave the way for more states to introduce similar mandates, in an effort to improve the solar application process countrywide.