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The speed at which a building department (Authority Having Jurisdiction, AHJ) issues building permits is crucial for determining how quickly an investment in real estate, whether for apartments, office buildings, or EV chargers, can be paid back. Green Water and Power, being one of the largest electrical contractors for EV chargers in the US, has extensive experience with the permitting process for installing EV chargers. Our company has built projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York City, Oregon, Texas, and Washington State, all of which were done in-house. Our project experience ranges from installing three Level 2 chargers in a single-family home to 150 units in a large Class A commercial building. Additionally, we have constructed over 500 Level 3 chargers, totaling just over 9,000 chargers across nearly 500 sites, averaging approximately 20 chargers per site.

This blog aims to provide comprehensive data on building department practices and timelines for obtaining permits. We will also tabulate the various AHJs with which Green Water and Power has worked, highlighting their efficiency in reviewing and issuing permits.

First, it is essential to recognize the AHJs that offer online, instant permits and the specific conditions under which instant permits are offered. These are AHJs where, once an electrical contractor/master electrician, etc., is registered in their system, permits can be obtained via a web portal within minutes. The following AHJs encountered by Green Water and Power provide instant permitting for EV chargers under the specified conditions:

Table 1. AHJs across the US that offer Instant Online Permitting for EV Chargers

A close second comes a group of AHJs that offer online applications where permits are not instant but only require clerical processing.  This group, shown in Table 2, also deserves recognition, as the longest time to receive one of these issued permits is 5 business days, effectively playing the same role as the group in Table 1 – that being contributing to the expedited development of clean transportation infrastructure.

Table 2. AHJs across the US that Online Permitting for EV Chargers with Clerical Processing Only

It is essential to recognize and commend the AHJs that have established a process for express permitting. The outcomes are evident—where AHJs have implemented express permitting (either instant or requiring a simple clerical review), the respective cities are excelling in the installation of chargers. GoBiz, the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development, reports that Los Angeles County, of which LA City comprises 40% of the population, boasts more installed chargers than the next seven counties in California combined (see Table 3).

It is noteworthy to mention that the data from Table 3 is derived from the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Alternative Fueling Station Locator (AFSL). In our experience, this data set predominantly includes chargers funded by the California Energy Commission (CEC), as the CEC mandates that rebate recipients register chargers on the DOE’s AFSL before receiving their rebate check. Consequently, this dataset may largely exclude data from private chargers and those financed by rebate programs from LADWP, SCE, PG&E, and others, a large driver of EV infrastructure buildout.

For a comparative analysis on a per-capita basis, Table 3 shows Santa Clara County notably leading the rankings. Santa Clara County encompasses numerous AHJs, including San Jose, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and others. This diversity may decrease the negative impact of slow permitting across the County.  The high number of chargers per capita could also be a result of large corporate workplace efforts in the Silicon Valley region, although we have no empirical data to support this assumption.

Table 3. Charger Quantities in the Top 8 Counties

In California, Assembly Bills 1236 and 970 established a requirement that AHJs adopt streamlined permitting procedures for EV chargers, including a checklist.  These bills have been codified into law since 2015 and 2021, respectively.  To gauge the level of compliance by the various AHJs, Go-Biz developed a website assigning a grade to every AHJ, which can be found here: https://california.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=5b34002aaffa4ac08b84d24016bf04ce.  The map on the site is predominantly green, suggesting that many AHJs are successfully meeting the legislative goals aimed at expediting the permitting process.

As one of the leading Engineering Procurement Construction and Maintenance (EPCM) firms specializing in EV infrastructure across the U.S., Green Water and Power has navigated the permitting of numerous projects in various jurisdictions. However, our own experiences with permitting challenges prompted surprise at the prevalence of the green status on the map, as this contradicted our own difficulties in obtaining permits promptly. This discrepancy led us to analyze our data further. We wanted to recognize those building departments excelling in their roles, while also highlighting those whose performance might not align with the positive portrayal suggested by the grading system on GoBiz’s website.

For sites lacking instant permitting or relying solely on clerical review, we tracked and calculated the duration it took for building departments to issue permits from the date of submission. In the realm of electrical permitting outside of EV chargers, a timeline of 4-8 weeks is generally standard across the US for receiving an issued permit after submitting a complete application. We noted that many cases fell within this range. Nevertheless, we also identified several outliers reflecting much longer waiting periods, revealing a more complex and troubling picture.  Table 4 presents this data set by AHJ, the number of projects Green Water and Power has permitted in that jurisdiction, and the average number of days it took the AHJ to issue the permit after Green Water and Power submitted a permit application to the AHJ.  It should be noted that Green Water and Power often received corrections and also had our own turnaround time to re-submit corrected drawings; however, we don’t believe that this misrepresents the turnaround time of AHJs.

Table 4. Timelines for various AHJs to review and issue permits after initially submission.

Silicon Valley may have helped lead the planet into the future with its support of computer science, but when it comes to deploying clean energy infrastructure, San Jose, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, and San Francisco are stuck in the past.  California, once heralded as an environmental leader and supporter of clean energy, is generally being outperformed by Arizona and Florida in terms of the timeframe to issue permits for construction work as innocuous as electric car chargers in an existing parking garage.