If you think the industry has devoted an extraordinary amount of attention in recent years to reducing solar project permitting costs and complications (and talking about reducing permitting costs and complications), you’re not imagining things.

A new report from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) highlights the various public, private and public-private efforts to cut red tape. Recent initiatives include the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Rooftop Solar Challenge, SolarTech’s Solar 3.0 National Platform for Process Innovation, SolarFreedomNow (which we profiled in the April issue of this magazine) and SolarABC’s Expedited Permit Process report, among others.

Meanwhile, a host of research literature examines the precise impact of permitting on installed solar’s costs. The Sierra Club, SunRun, Clean Power Finance, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and others have all crunched the data in recent years, LBNL notes in its new report.

But what have all of these studies and initiatives yielded? Is there value in combining their fruits, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of their methods, and producing yet another set of data?

LBNL’s report, titled “The Impact of City-level Permitting Processes on Residential PV Installation Prices and Development Times: An Empirical Analysis of Solar Systems in California Cities,” draws a few interesting new conclusions.

First, the study confirms that PV soft costs account for “well over 50 percent of the installed price of residential PV in the U.S.” City-level permitting was found to have an especially strong impact on both prices and installation timelines.

Best permitting practices (as determined by the lab, using data from the DOE, California Solar Initiative and other sources) can make a difference on both the pricing and timeline fronts: For the California data set used, streamlining permitting procedures resulted in an average system cost reduction of $0.27/W to $0.77/W and a 24-day decrease in development delays.

And on a different note, this issue of Solar Industry is my last as editor. After more than five years of involvement with the magazine since it made its print debut in early 2008, I am moving on to a new industry (but remain an unwavering solar advocate!). Feel free to send your industry news, press releases, article ideas and other inquiries to Michael Bates, managing editor, at bates@solarindustrymag.com.

From record-setting installation growth to the Solyndra ordeal to global trade wars, it has been an undeniably exciting, sometimes-frustrating and fascinating time to cover the solar sector these past years. I thank you all for taking me along for the ride. R