“The average American family is paying $36,000 for the same home solar system that an Australian family would spend $6,000 on. It's effectively the same panels, same wires. The big cost difference comes from red tape.”
Climate One · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
The host noted that home solar is far cheaper in some other countries and asked why. Nick Josefowitz, who works with state governments on permitting, says local permits and utility approvals turn a few days' work into months.
Transcript
And I'm Ariana Brocious. Kusha, I love this job because I'm always learning new things, you know. And something I learned in the last year that frankly really surprised me is how much cheaper it is to install home solar panels in other countries besides ours.
Yeah, we're talking like 80% cheaper. It's really dramatic. And as I learned from our next guest, a lot of that has to do with everyone's favorite thing: red tape. I talked to Nick Josefowitz of the Energy Affordability Nonprofit Permit Power, and he laid it all out quite clearly.
So the average American family is paying $36,000 for the same home solar system that an Australian family would spend $6,000 on. And it's effectively the same panels, same wires, that type of stuff. And the big cost difference comes from red tape. And that's the kind of local government permitting and then the utility approval process that you have to go through in the US that takes what most Australian families would be able to do in a few days and drags it out in the US to several months, sometimes if you're really unlucky over a year. And, you know, time is money. And so not only does it add an enormous amount of costs and delays, it also makes it much more difficult to sell these products. And so companies have to spend more on sales and marketing. And it kind of creates this negative spiral.
So in these other countries like Australia, for instance, it's faster, more efficient, less bureaucratic block holding to actually get the panels approved and installed.
Absolutely. So in In Australia, it takes a few days. The process that you have to go through to get the approval from your local government and from your utility is incredibly streamlined. They really want to make it as easy as possible for families to save money by installing home solar and…
So, how do you fix it then? I mean, I guess that's why your organization, your work exists, right?
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