Early in July, President Trump signed legislation that is expected to raise energy prices and exacerbate our energy affordability crisis nationwide.
To add insult to injury, our regional electric grid operator, known as PJM Inc., last week announced their latest energy price auction results hit another record high — partially because of a massive backlog on getting clean-energy projects online.
As legislative leaders in New Jersey, our focus is on delivering utility bill savings to our fellow New Jerseyans and shoring up our electric grid. One of the best ways to achieve both goals is to more quickly deploy more rooftop solar and batteries across the state.
To make solar and battery installations cheaper and easier for families, we authored — and the Legislature unanimously passed — a bill (S-4100/A-5264) that would speed and streamline the permitting process. By signing it into law, Gov. Murphy can show New Jerseyans that New Jersey is serious about providing affordable and reliable power while continuing to make progress toward our climate goals.
Our state has long been a solar leader. New Jerseyans have realized that by going solar they can reduce their electricity bills, protect themselves during extreme weather events and do their part to help to reduce climate change and air pollutants.
But, when families in our state want to go solar, they encounter burdensome permitting red tape that drives up installation costs and leads to more than 1 in 5 projects getting canceled. Easing permitting is one of those rare wins for all involved — saving time and money for families, local installers and local governments. And now, at a time when the Trump administration and its allies in Congress are eliminating federal tax credits for homeowners who choose to save on their utility bills, New Jersey can establish itself as a nationwide leader on solar accessibility by signing S-4100/A-5264 into law.
The current process for getting rooftop solar in New Jersey is frustrating and resource-intensive. To install solar on your home, you first need a permit application approved by your typically overburdened city or town. Permitting officials spend hours manually working through extensive code compliance checks, rounding up approvals from many different departments and ensuring that often-antiquated requirements are met. No one wants the extra costs or uncertainties created by this process when making a change to their power supply.
The legislation we introduced to address these problems would make “smart permitting” for rooftop solar and home batteries available statewide, allowing families with code-compliant projects to get the approvals they need online, almost instantly.
The good news is that hundreds of cities across the country are already using smart permitting to fast-track solar applications, quickly and safely delivering energy independence and lower bills to their residents. For example, across the jurisdictions where Solar APP+, the smart permitting platform developed by the federal government, is in use, the software sped up the approval process by an average of 14 business days and saved more than 15,000 hours of local government staff time.
We know that smart permitting can unlock tremendous benefits for New Jersey. Earlier this year, Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimated that adopting smart permitting statewide could reduce the cost of installing a typical rooftop system by as much as $4,500, and result in an additional 200,000 residential solar systems being deployed by 2040.
This legislation passed both the state Senate and Assembly on a bipartisan basis. The landslide of support it has received reflects a consensus that, especially in the face of soaring electricity costs and demand, we need to empower New Jerseyans to take control of their own energy futures.
Gov. Murphy could bring solar permitting into the 21st century, reduce costs and burdens on our communities, rapidly get clean energy online and save ratepayers money. We urge him to sign S-4100/A-5264 into law. That’ll be a win for our environment, our grid, and all of us.