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The Bay Area Climate Collaborative launches into Solving the Permitting Dilemma.

The working documents for SolarTech's Permitting Challenge are now on the web, yea!

Go to www.solartech.org/publications and download.  We finally got a press release out, and it did apparently generated a small article on the subject. Solar Industry Magazine just published this a little piece. We are making progress, but we need to crank it up a bit.

I've mentioned before the upcoming Permitting and Installation Symposium on December 3rd. We've assembled an amazing group of speakers and panelists, such as the Cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, Sebastopol and San Jose, PG&E, CSE, Burnham Energy, Bill Brooks, the CPUC, Solar City, California First and the list goes on. Check out the agenda at www.solartech.org. I really have to hand it to our Marketing Director. She has done an amazing job of pulling this all together; and securing the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco for the venue. Way to go Fabienne. She gave me 10 minutes to present the terms and conditions of the Challenge. Hopefully I'll have a few participants to announce. Click here to register or learn more.

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Today's blog entry is sort of a grab-bag of topics.

Finally by the end of this week we should have the documentation for the online permit challenge down loadable from the SolarTech web site. Sorry for the delays, but it takes a lot of time to spit-polish documents into the appropriate state of quality and content. But, it's done, at least my part. Be assured that my product manager will get them posted by Friday.

The same is true of our PPA and Site License agreement templates, which we announced at Solar Power International. This has proven to be one hot topic. In fact the very first reader comments on this blog site are PPA related. Everyone wants to know how to download, but it takes time to set up Paypal and such. Ok, that one's done as well. In the next month we hope to also release the following templates:

• Request for Information
• Credit Pre-qualification
• Alternate Collateral Options
• Financing Options Consumer Guide Summary

Good stuff, wouldn't you say! Add a comment

I had the good fortune today to attend a webinar presented by Bill Brooks of Brooks Engineering, and sponsored by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). IREC, along with SolarTech, is supporting the recommended permit process developed by the Solar America Board of Codes and Standards (Solar ABCs). Bill's presentation was titled, "Expedited Permit Process for Small PV Systems," and as always is full of more codes and technical details than I can absorb in one sitting. Great stuff if you are a code official. As I listened to Bill, my mind wondered back to why SolarTech made the decision to support Solar ABCs.

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At Solar Power International (Anaheim, Oct. 2009) SolarTech introduced the industry's first publicly available PPA contract template and associated Site License agreement. Boy was it a hit. We got inquiries from as far away as China. So, why? Why was is it so popular and why did we do this to begin with?

Well after all SolarTech is a membership organization and our members (solar stakeholders) told us 18 months ago that financial transaction costs were too high and pointed their collective finger at PPAs. After several false starts we got moving with help from a grant from the California Energy Commission. The biggest hurdle was who and how to create a draft. Finally I reached out to Ed Feo of Milbank and much to everyone's surprise, he said yes. Then I reached out to the law firm of Paul Hastings and Bill DeGrandis from the DC office replied with the same yes kind of response. Wow, I'm on a roll. I contacted several other firms and all were interested in supporting this project, but just didn't have the bandwidth at that point to actively engage. And so the project was launched.

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