This 85-page document covers a variety of solar legal issues including solar access, power purchase agreements, solar development contracts, regulations, permitting, solar financing contracts, and renewable energy credits. Note that this document is not legal advice or a legal opinion on specific facts or circumstances.

Applied Materials is one of the most important U.S. companies you’ve probably never heard of. It makes the machines that make the microchips that go inside your computer. The chip business, though, is volatile, so in 2004 Mike Splinter, Applied Materials’s C.E.O., decided to add a new business line to take advantage of the company’s nanotechnology capabilities — making the machines that make solar panels.

This report documents the safe operation of PV systems without a utility external disconnect switch in several large jurisdictions. It includes recommendations for regulators contemplating utility external disconnect switch requirements.

This report defines a FIT policy, explores U.S. FIT policy design, and highlights a few of the best practices in FIT policy design. It also explores how FITs can be used to target state policy goals and examines policy interactions with other renewable energy policies. An overview of FIT impacts (jobs and economic development) in Europe is included.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) is a nonprofit organization established in 1984 by a bipartisan, bicameral group of members of Congress. The institutes charter is to disseminate timely information and develop innovative policy solutions that set the United States on a cleaner and more secure and sustainable energy path. This fact sheet reports the major findings from job-creation studies in the renewable, fossil, and nuclear energy industries.

This paper summarizes five common regulatory challenges for third party PPA financing, when they occur, and how they have been addressed in five states. This paper also presents alternative to the third-party ownership PPA finance model, including solar leases, contractual intermediaries, standardized contract language, federal investment tax credits, clean renewable energy bonds, and waived monopoly powers.

This report relies on six in-depth interviews with loan program administrators to provide descriptions of existing programs. Findings from the interviews are combined with a review of relevant literature to elicit best practices and lessons learned from existing loan programs. Data collected from each of the loan programs profiled are used to quantify the impacts of these specific loan programs on the commonly cited, overarching state clean energy goals of energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.

Following in the footsteps of states like New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, Massachusetts is about to implement a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) solar requirement. Like other solar RPS states, Massachusetts will spark solar demand by creating a market for Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs), each of which represents one megawatt-hour of solar electricity generation.

Guidelines included in this report form a framework for inspecting and permitting PV systems. Guidelines are divided into two stages: plan checking and field inspection. The objective of these guidelines is to facilitate the installation of safe PV systems at minimal cost.

This report presents the information that homeowners and policy makers need to facilitate PV financing at the residential level. The full range of cash payments, bill savings, and tax incentives is covered, as well as potentially available solar attribute payments. Traditional financing is also compared to innovative solutions, many of which are borrowed from the commercial sector.