Third Act is a national organization of American activists over the age of 60, focusing on the issues of climate and democracy. The group was founded by author and climate activist Bill McKibben, whose 2025 book titled, “Here Comes the Sun,” extols the value of solar energy for providing affordable, carbon-free power, and the importance of making this renewable energy source accessible to everyone in the world.
A related new initiative to expand the use of solar power is Third Act’s nationwide project called “Simplify Solar,” a campaign to make residential rooftop solar more affordable.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Lynn Stoddard, a volunteer with Third Act, who’s helping to coordinate the Simplify Solar campaign in Connecticut. Here she discusses the effort to educate local building inspectors and elected officials on a new smartphone app that streamlines the permitting process for rooftop solar, which makes this green technology more affordable.
LYNN STODDARD: Simplify Solar is a campaign organized by Third Act national all across the country. And it’s based on the premise that rooftop residential solar is two to three times as expensive in the United States as it is in Germany, some European countries and Australia.
And the major reason for this is what they call the soft costs, which are the permitting costs. In Australia, you can get a permit within a day for a simple rooftop solar installation. In the U.S., it can take weeks, months or more. And so those delays incur costs for the homeowner, for the staff that’s doing tedious reviews at the local level. And so, Simplify Solar is an acknowledgment that we have some leverage at our local permitting level to try to make solar permitting more simple and straightforward. And there’s some great tools for that. So that’s what we’re hoping to educate people about and get them engaged with through the campaign.
MELINDA TUHUS: How does that work? Because if it’s a national campaign, aren’t requirements different all over the place? How does this tool—and maybe you could say more about the tool—how does that tool work?
LYNN STODDARD: Requirements are different. We’re trying to intervene at that level. But there’s some simple things that are similar. So typically an installer or a homeowner submits for a permit and then there’s a review period by the jurisdiction, the town or whoever.
One of these tools that we’re going to be educating people about is called the SolarAPP+. And it’s basically a platform that was developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. So our tax dollars at work through this U.S. Department of Energy lab over the course of years involving local building officials, solar installers, experts in solar panel design and so on, and the researchers at the lab there looking at what are the things that building departments look at to approve a permit on a residential roof. So they have built this amazing online platform that includes constantly updated electrical codes, building codes for all the states.
And then you can layer on any things that are customized for a specific region like load on a roof from snow or something like that in addition to the panels or the wind in a given area. There’s this platform that incorporates all these things and those are what the building official is looking at during the permitting, like, okay, does it meet the electric code? Does it meet this and that?
So what can happen now with SolarAPP and is happening in well over 300 towns and cities across the country already, is the town will say, “Yeah, I want to use SolarAPP, this online automated permitting system.” It’s customized specifically for the town and SolarAPP, which is now run by a nonprofit. An installer can apply for a permit at any time of night. If you want to put solar on your roof or your installer doesn’t have to appear at your town hall at between 10 and 2 on a Thursday or something like that, they could submit your permit at 2 in the morning.
It’s a standardized permit for your roof for anyone in any town using the SolarApp and it’s comparing it to this huge database of codes that are constantly updated and whatnot. Basically, the installer fills in the permit fields and if it meets the code, suddenly the permit is automated and is granted. It frees up the building inspector’s time of training on all the codes, checking all the codes, reviewing each permit against these books of codes and whatnot and generates an inspection list so that when that town is ready to go out and the solar has been installed, they’re ready to go out and inspect it so it can be hooked up to the electrical system and given the go-ahead. That’s the time that the building official is spending. They’re doing that now. They’re doing the building review and the inspection, but this basically focuses their time on the inspection with a very targeted list that’s already been teased out from the permit application.
So this tool can be used across the country. It gets customized a little bit, depending on the region and the location. It’s free to towns, which is amazing. Installers pay like $25, so it can also reduce permitting fees. It can make a town like you have a new building official, the training and coming up to speed on all these things is handled through the SolarAPP platform. It speeds up the process. You could get the permit within a day.
For more information, visit Third Act’s website on the Simplify Solar campaign. The SolarAPP+ app can be found here: gosolarapp.org.
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