Oahu’s rooftop solar permits were up year over year in July for the fifth month in a row.
The number of photovoltaic permits issued by the City and County of Honolulu rose 47 percent as they continued reversing a trend that had seen permits fall for two years in a row. The city issued 738 permits, up from 502 in July 2014, according to data from Marco Mangelsdorf, who tracks rooftop solar permits and is president of Hilo-based ProVision Solar.
“This is a bubble that is going to burst not too long from now,” he said.
Mangelsdorf said the growth is a result of Hawaiian Electric Co. approving a backlog of customers waiting for approval. He said another factor contributing to the increase was a concern that new solar customers will miss out on an incentive program that credits solar owners for the excess energy their solar systems produce. HECO proposed to change the incentive program, or net energy metering (NEM), in January and is waiting on the state Public Utilities Commission to approve the change.
“The bump over the past months is due to HECO opening up more space on the grid and the success that PV contractors have achieved in creating a sense of urgency among homeowners that if they don’t act now, they may not get the prize of a soon-to-be-discontinued net energy metering program,” Mangelsdorf said.
The top permit pullers in 2015 are Hawaii Energy Connection, Alternate Energy, RevoluSun, American Electric and REC Solar, according to Mangelsdorf’s data.
Chris DeBone, managing partner at Hawaii Energy Connection, said the company’s leading position is due to the cleared queue.
“We patiently waited and did not install those customers,” DeBone said. “We didn’t pull the permit until we were actually approved. These customers that have been installed in the last three and four months have been customers waiting for years, well before this change in NEM has even been talked about.”
Colin Yost, chief operating officer at RevoluSun, said the industry will continue to be busy through the end of 2016.
“February was one of the largest sales months in the history of the company,” Yost said. “The industry generally has plenty of work to do at this point.”
Despite the recent growth, Yost said HECO’s approval of solar systems and its proposed change in NEM have caused volatility in pulled permits.
“To eliminate the roller coaster trend, we need the utility to adopt a more transparent, consistent, conveyer-belt type approval process,” Yost said. “Demand for solar is always strong in Hawaii, and fluctuations in permit data relate directly to how many projects HECO approves. While HECO was busy clearing the initial backlog, another, equally long queue of NEM applications formed, and HECO recently released a substantial number of those projects.”
The Oahu utility promised last year to clear a backlog of 2,749 systems that were waiting for HECO approval in October. The utility said that as of the end of March, it had approved 2,543 of the pending Oahu applications and will approve the entire backlog by the end of 2015.
The solar industry took a hit when HECO announced in 2013 that all rooftop solar systems needed HECO approval before being connected to the grid. Applications started piling up after HECO was slow to approve systems in areas that already had a large number of rooftop systems. HECO said the delay was due to concerns about safety and the stability of the grid if more solar was added in those areas.
As of Aug. 11 there were 48,000 systems approved on Oahu, according to the latest figures from HECO.
