Building takes years. You have to subdivide, plan for utilities, stormwater and traffic, permit the buildings, etc, and suddenly invalidating a bunch of stuff midway through the process they just picked a date 2 years out to avoid the legal and administrative nightmare of yanking existing permits and making them re-design.
Typically when code changes existing permits are grandfathered in, they don’t pull outstanding permits and make them comply with new code. For something as relatively minor as residential solar you should really only need a few months notice at most I would think. Like either the plans are drafted and ready for submission soon or you’re still in the planning phase and just add panels.
Building takes years. You have to subdivide, plan for utilities, stormwater and traffic, permit the buildings, etc, and suddenly invalidating a bunch of stuff midway through the process they just picked a date 2 years out to avoid the legal and administrative nightmare of yanking existing permits and making them re-design.
Typically when code changes existing permits are grandfathered in, they don’t pull outstanding permits and make them comply with new code. For something as relatively minor as residential solar you should really only need a few months notice at most I would think. Like either the plans are drafted and ready for submission soon or you’re still in the planning phase and just add panels.
If the new rule is all new houses are required to have solar, that’s not a change to the solar code.
And there are other implications, such as all roofs having to be designed to accommodate solar, from structural elements to orientation of faces.