This Week in Solar

Here’s a question I get all the time: why does solar cost so much more here than in other countries?Allow me to answer by attempting to teach you about permitting (in a way that won’t put you to sleep).What’s newOn Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 73–25 to move forward on the biggest energy permitting bill in decades. It’s called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA, pronounced however you want).Let’s define “permitting” at a level we can all understand before we move on. For our purposes here, let’s say that permitting is the government saying “yes, you can build that,” federally or locally.Every power plant, power line, and solar array needs permits before it can be built. When we’re talking about utility-scale power generation, getting those permits can take years.If you’re still awake, let’s continue!The bill (BAAJA) tries to speed that up. Here’s what’s in it:Faster federal reviews. Hard deadlines for agencies to say yes or no on big energy projects, so they can’t just sit on applications forever.More power lines. New rules that make it much easier to build the long-distance transmission lines we need to move clean power around the country.Data centers pay their own way. Data centers would have to cover the cost of the grid upgrades they cause, instead of passing those costs to regular households.Protection for approved projects. It becomes much harder for any president to yank permits from projects that already got the green light.A small push on rooftop solar. The Department of Energy would set up a program to help towns speed up permits and inspections for home solar, batteries, and EV chargers, including an online instant-permitting tool.The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the solar industry’s main trade group, estimates the bill could help add 167 gigawatts of new solar between 2028 and 2035 (enough to power 17 New York cities). More than 300 solar and storage companies signed a letter urging Congress to pass it. President Trump has also endorsed it.It’s also important to mention that not everyone’s on board.Groups like the Sierra Club and Environment America say BAAJA weakens clean water and wildlife protections and limits the public’s ability to weigh in on projects.Now before we talk about why this is all so important and why solar’s cheaper in other countries, we need to talk about Exact Solar.This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-one-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.And from now till the end of the year, if you refer us any of your friends in New Jersey or Pennsylvania who go solar, we will not only pay you our normal $500 referral bonus, but we’ll also send you an EcoFlow portable power bank and solar panels!From November 1 through December 31, 2026, you’ll receive an EcoFlow portable power station and solar panel bundle in addition to our standard $500 bonus when an eligible referral goes solar with us.*There’s no limit to the number of qualifying $500 referral bonuses you can earn. The EcoFlow bundle is limited to one per person.Refer a Friend to Exact Solar

Aaron talks with Yann Vermeil Schremmer, founder of All In Solar, who helps innovative solar startups grow. He’s currently working on BalkonSonne.App, a German startup that helps installers sell balcony solar, and Sunbooster, an Austrian company that turns ordinary garden fences into solar power plants.If you want to know why balcony solar took over Germany — and how a tiny plug-in system can be the first step toward a full rooftop system — this is the episode for you.Expect to learn:Why Germany has more than a million registered plug-in solar systems (and possibly millions more that nobody bothered to register).How a small balcony kit can lead to a rooftop system, a battery, and a heat pump a few years later, and why solar installers should want that first sale.How solar strips threaded through an ordinary garden fence can make five-plus kilowatts of power without anyone climbing onto a roof.This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.And from now till the end of the year, if you refer us any of your friends in our service area who go solar, we will not only pay you our normal $500 referral bonus, but we’ll also send you an EcoFlow portable power bank and solar panels!From November 1 through December 31, 2026, you’ll receive an EcoFlow portable power station and solar panel bundle in addition to our standard $500 bonus when an eligible referral goes solar with us.*If you know someone who has been considering solar, this is a simple way to help them get started and earn yourself a cool reward while doing it!How it works:Visit exactsolar.com/referral/ and submit the referral form.Our team will reach out to your referral.If they go solar with us, you’ll receive your $500 referral bonus and EcoFlow bundle once their qualifying system is installed.Eligibility requirements:The referral must be brand new. The customer cannot have been previously referred to Exact Solar or received an estimate, proposal, site visit, or service from us at any time.The referral must purchase a new solar energy system from Exact Solar.All referrals must be initiated through exactsolar.com/referral/.Referrals must be submitted between November 1, 2026 and December 31, 2026.There’s no limit to the number of qualifying $500 referral bonuses you can earn. The EcoFlow bundle is limited to one per person.Refer a Friend to Exact SolarQuote from the episode:“If you’re the one who helped them make that first step, who are they going to come back to the moment they want that roof installation? You.”— Yann Vermeil Schremmer

What’s newRight now, four utility companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania will pay homeowners to install home batteries, either up front or over time once they have a battery installed.If you live in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, it’s time to talk to Exact Solar about installing battery backup for your home so your utility company can pay you for storing power and running your home on it in times of high need.Schedule a Free Consultation With Exact Solar’s TeamNow, why would utility companies do this? Because I promise you, it’s not too good to be true. Everyone wins.Why utility companies are doing this, in a nutshell:One of the major reasons that energy has gotten so expensive in Pennsylvania and New Jersey is that it’s gotten very, very expensive to make sure there’s enough energy to go around at times of high need, like when everyone goes home and turns their heat on on the coldest days of the year.That’s essentially what people are talking about when they talk about PJM and data centers raising energy prices in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. All this new data center buildout is particularly expensive because data centers not only take a lot of power, but they can never have downtime.So the price of making sure there’s always enough power to go around has shot through the roof.It’s now so expensive to generate power at times of high need that it’s cheaper for utility companies to pay thousands of homeowners with batteries to run their homes off battery power at times of high need than it is to build new energy-generating resources.This is what’s known as a Virtual Power Plant, or VPP. A VPP is basically thousands of home batteries teaming up to act like one big power plant. On the few hours a year when the grid is stretched thin, your utility sends a signal to your battery, and your battery powers your home for a little while instead of the grid.For a few hours at times of very high need, the utility company can use the power the home would have been using elsewhere.Four different utility companies in our region have launched these programs: PSE&G, JCP&L, PECO, and PPL.Depending on where you live, that could mean up to $5,000 off your battery up front, or a few hundred dollars a year in checks, adding up to a few thousand dollars per year over time.If you buy power from one of those four utility companies, it’s time to talk to Exact Solar about battery backup paired with solar for your home. Each utility program has different rules, so we’ll need to see your energy usage and who you buy power from before we can tell you how much you qualify for!Schedule a Free Consultation With Exact Solar’s Team

Aaron talks with Yann Brandt, the founder and managing editor of SolarWakeup, co-host of the Boots on the Ground podcast (with former SEIA CEO Abby Hopper), and former President and CEO of FTC Solar.Yann has spent 20 years building, scaling, and turning around solar companies at every level of the industry.If you want to know what pro-solar people should actually ask their lawmakers for after Election Day, and why showing up matters more than being right, this is the episode for you.Listen to this episode here, or on:YouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyConnect with Yann on LinkedIn here.Read Yann’s daily solar newsletter at SolarWakeup.Listen to Boots on the Ground with Yann Brandt and Abby Hopper here.This Week In Solar is always brought to you by Exact Solar, your locally owned, twenty-year-old solar installer for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.Energy bills in Pennsylvania and New Jersey are climbing faster than almost anywhere in the country, and no one has a good plan to fix it. You can opt out of the cycle by going solar. If you live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, we’d love to run your numbers.Show Me How Much I Can Save With SolarExpect to learn:Why most solar companies have never met their lawmakers (and how that cost homeowners the 30% ownership tax credit).How a decades-old law governing satellite dishes could be the model for faster, cheaper rooftop solar.Why your electric bill is rising faster than the rest of the country if you live in PJM’s territoryQuote from the episode:“Ultimately right now, most people are not doing it at all, which isn’t going to help when you need to make a call and ask for something, because they don’t know you and they don’t know what you stand for.”— Yann Brandt

Disclaimer: I (Aaron Nichols) took a risk by opening my electrical panel to install the APMeter, and neither Exact Solar nor I would ever recommend that any homeowner take the same risk by opening their electrical panel and attempting to install anything themselves. Our official recommendation is to wait until plug-in solar is legal in your area before purchasing an inverter, and to always hire trained professionals for any projects that would modify your electrical panel in any way.In today’s video, Aaron unboxes a plug-in solar inverter from APsystems, sets it up at home, and reports back after two and a half months with exactly how much energy it made and how much money that amount of energy would save anyone living in Exact Solar’s service area.Plug-in solar (sometimes called balcony solar) is about as simple as solar gets. You connect a panel or two to a small inverter, plug it into a regular wall outlet, and it feeds power straight into your home. There’s no roof installation, and no permits.If you want to know how much plug-in solar actually saves in the real world, and who it makes the most sense for, this is the episode for you.Thank you to APSystems for sending us an inverter to test. You can learn more about the APsystems EZ1 plug-in inverter here:APSystems EZ1 InverterExpect to learn:How much electricity a plug-in solar system made in two and a half months, and what that’s worth on a Pennsylvania or New Jersey electric bill.The small gadget that let Aaron run his system without sending a single watt back to the grid, and why that mattered where he lives.Quote from the episode:“What’s really cool about this is that I can own an energy-generating resource and plug it into the grid without anyone’s approval and save some money. That’s what I love about plug-in solar.”— Aaron Nichols