With a new expedited permitting process for small photovoltaic solar systems, Palm Beach County is officially a SolSmart Gold community, achieving the highest SolSmart designation level just last week.

 

SolSmart, led by The Solar Foundation and the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, is a national designation program designed to provide recognition for communities that have made it easier, faster, and more affordable for business and home owners to invest in solar energy. Qualifying communities can achieve Gold, Silver, or Bronze designation by meeting certain criteria. Although SolSmart recognizes over 350 jurisdictions nationwide, Palm Beach County is one of only 125 jurisdictions to achieve Gold status. In Florida, only 12 communities have achieved Gold status.

 

The County’s Office of Resilience (OOR) helped Palm Beach County achieve SolSmart Silver status in 2017. Over the past year, OOR worked with the County’s Planning, Zoning, and Building Department (PZB) to encourage more solar growth and remove additional obstacles to solar development. Through PZB’s leadership, the County now offers three-day permit processing times for small solar photovoltaic systems (FPL Tier 1 - up to 10 kW) on existing site-built detached single-family dwellings, which led to the County’s Gold designation. In the future, PZB hopes to increase the processing speed to ‘next day’ and ‘walk-thru’ time frames.
 
To see the Expedited Solar PV Checklist form, please visit the Planning, Zoning, and Building Forms page, here.
 
To read more about solar energy in Palm Beach County, please visit the Office of Resilience solar webpage, here.