16-05-2025
Going solar should be cheaper and easier. Local governments are standing in the way.
(Getty Images)
Colorado doesn't need to wait on Washington to address climate change, reduce costs for families, and make government work more efficiently. We have the power to make it cheaper and quicker for families to install rooftop solar and home batteries by streamlining local permitting processes.
Unfortunately, permitting wait times and delays for rooftop solar in Colorado are some of the worst in the western United States.
In Arapahoe County, for example, the majority of permits take more than 10 weeks to process. These delays impose significant costs. According to a recent analysis by Brown University, local red tape increases the price of installing a residential solar system by more than $3,200. This price hike puts solar out reach of thousands of Coloradans, particularly low- and middle-income families. As solar professionals in Colorado, we can attest to the detrimental impact of these unnecessary bureaucratic barriers: fewer jobs installing solar and more greenhouse gas emissions.
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Wisely, our General Assembly offered legislation this year to tackle this problem. House Bill 25-1096, sponsored by Reps. Lesley Smith and Kyle Brown and Sen. Matt Ball, and championed by Gov. Jared Polis, would have required our cities and counties to implement one of several software platforms that automatically approve most residential solar and home battery permits. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden developed one of these software platforms, SolarAPP+, which is now used in Denver — and in hundreds of other localities around the country. Using a platform such as SolarAPP+ also makes for faster inspections. Automating solar permitting is one of those rare win-wins — saving families and solar installers money and headaches, and saving cities and counties resources and time.
But climate-forward cities and counties, including Boulder and Fort Collins, lined up this legislative session to oppose the legislation and were ultimately responsible for its demise. They argued that automated permitting would prevent them from assessing the historical significance of every home built before 1975 before allowing solar panels on its roof, that certain homes in flood plains should be raised on stilts before they were allowed to install rooftop solar, and that their government IT departments would struggle to implement widely-used free software.
Their opposition is disappointing. Boulder and Fort Collins have set goals to get to 100% renewable energy by 2030 — a stronger target than even the state of Colorado. And yet city officials and local electeds in Boulder and Fort Collins spent valuable time and resources lobbying against a common-sense solution that would make rooftop solar cheaper for Coloradans statewide.
Our local governments should keep two important considerations in mind. First, decarbonization is on the chopping block in Washington, including critical funding for renewable energy projects and facilities in Colorado. Our cities and counties — especially those that claim to be environmental leaders — should do everything in their power to ensure that as subsidies go away we make renewable energy as cheap to buy and as fast to deploy as possible.
Second, we are seeing just how many Americans have lost faith in the simple idea that the government prioritizes our needs over its processes. Across the ideological spectrum, more and more believe that government is standing in the way of building what we need, from critical national infrastructure to a simple home renovation. Cities and counties in Colorado like Boulder and Fort Collins should be at the forefront of creating an efficient government that prioritizes people, rather than hiding behind local exceptionalism to justify burdensome red tape and costly inefficiency.
Colorado is blessed with abundant sunshine, and a commitment to good government. We urge our cities, counties and the legislature to step up and make it easier for Coloradans to install rooftop solar, reduce their utility bills and fight the climate crisis.
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