San Francisco becomes first major US city to mandate rooftop solar on new buildings

In which the City requires new buildings to go from ‘solar ready’ rooftops to solar actual.

The City by the Bay just took a big step toward its goal of powering the city with 100% renewable electricity by 2025 with the passage of a bill that will require new residential and commercial buildings to include rooftop solar, either solar electric or solar water heating. This ordinance, which was unanimously passed by the city’s Board of Supervisors, is essentially the extension of an existing regulation that required new building projects to designate 15% of a building’s roof as being “solar ready,” which means unshaded and clear of obstructions and reserved for solar.

With the new ordinance, this 15% solar ready area will not only be reserved for solar, but will also be required to actually have solar on it, which is a big missing piece of the original. The regulation will only apply to new construction of buildings of less than 10 floors (which is also the case with the original), and in an already highly developed metropolis such as San Francisco, the demand for new buildings with less than 10 floors to them isn’t nearly as high as in a smaller, less dense city, so it’s not exactly a massive solar plan for the city, by any means. And as Fortune points out, it can be a particularly difficult city to for building development, so this solar addition may just add to the potential challenges for builders.

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