The City of Santa Barbara, California, has streamlined the permitting process for both residential solar and residential solar with battery energy storage systems through a process called On-Demand Permitting (ODP).
ODP eliminates the plan check phase in permitting and issues a permit immediately, as long as the proposed project meets minimum requirements. Solar systems rated less than 10 kW with optional energy storage systems less than 47 kWh are eligible for this type of permit.
Once the system has been installed and is undergoing project inspection, City Building and Safety staff will verify that the project has met permit terms.
The city said that building a vast network of distributed energy resources is an important step toward ensuring energy resilience and reliability, citing California’s recent history of destructive natural disasters and rolling power shutoffs as challenges that need to be addressed.
This move to streamline distributed generation permitting by the City of Santa Barbara mirrors Hawaiian Electric Co.’s new Quick Connect program. Customers on Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii islands installing new systems can now have the standard approval process be handled after the system is built and turned on.
The key differences are that Hawaiian Electric’s program does not include residential storage and caps out system size at 25 kW in capacity, with Santa Barbara’s cap being a much lower 10 kW. Hawaiian Electric’s program is also only set to run for a year, with the possibility of expansion later, while Santa Barbara’s appears to be indefinite.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.