Funding Opportunity: SunShot Technology to Market (Incubator 10)
SunShot Subprogram: Technology to Market
Location: San Francisco, CA
Amount Awarded: $900,000
Awardee Cost Share: $900,000

Sunrun Inc., in collaboration with Clean Power Research, will develop and commercialize the first end-to-end system for automatic permit set generation, submission, and approval. This platform will enable residential solar project developers to automatically generate permit sets and allow them to submit these packages electronically to authority having jurisdictions (AHJs) for review and approval. 

Approach

Residential solar permits are required for every customer who installs solar on their home. The 18,000 building permit agencies in the U.S. each have their own application processes and rules, creating red tape that is costly and can add up to four weeks of delay to a homeowner’s system installation timeline. This project will cut these costs and the delay time in half by integrating the software platforms of Sunrun and Clean Power Research and adding new functionality that will automate the permitting process.

Innovation

Sunrun BrightPath is a proprietary software platform that manages the home solar process from selecting hardware to system design, pricing, scheduling, installation, and beyond. It will allow users to enter customer and system design information only once and automatically apply for permits and interconnection from utilities using Clean Power Research’s PowerClerk. This ability to streamline permitting will not only benefit the solar industry, but also the building permit agencies, who will be able to leverage the same PowerClerk platform that utilities and energy agencies are using today to process more than 12,500 interconnection and incentive applications per month.