A few Maryland counties already offer virtual inspections, which have “saved a ton of time, a lot of headaches,” Kelly said. That’s particularly useful for follow-up inspections, which installers can respond to by fixing identified problems and sending in video evidence on the same day. Other counties, by contrast, can take from a day to more than a month to schedule on-site inspections and follow-ups, she said.
Not all Maryland counties are happy about adopting virtual inspections or online solar permitting, however. The Maryland Association of Counties warned state lawmakers in a March letter that “a highly prescriptive state mandate could undermine local flexibility, strain budgets, and compromise safety safeguards.”
Carla Blackwell, who led Pima County’s adoption of virtual inspections and instant solar permitting as director of its development services department before retiring last year, understands those concerns.
“We always hated when the state legislature got involved and passed some sort of mandate,” she said. “If you want to get people on board, you have to get them involved and part of the process — both so that they understand and support it and so they don’t sabotage it in some aspect.”
Pima County started using these technologies out of necessity, she added. The 2008 real-estate market crash forced her department to lay off about two-thirds of its staff, forcing it to find ways to do more with fewer employees.
It took some work. The county had to upgrade its permit management software to handle the new digital inputs, for example. That might not be a welcome prospect for smaller permitting agencies, she said. “The minute you mention IT to a government department, they’re like, ‘Uh-oh, I don’t want to deal with those guys.’”
But once the software is in place and employees are trained in using it, virtual inspections can improve the quality of work being done, she said. “I actually spend more time with you on these remote field inspections than if I had to drive out, spend five minutes, and then drive to the next one.”
Creating digital records of the projects can also help inspectors catch errors that brief on-site inspections can miss, she noted. That’s backed up by IREC’s report, which cited multiple building department officials affirming the benefits of being able to review photos and videos to do quality checks.
That’s true for more than solar and battery installations, said Colleen Corrigan, sustainability and resilience policy manager at the nonprofit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). Her group and Permit Power are co-sponsoring a state bill that would give California homeowners the option of requesting remote inspections for water heaters, heat pumps, and rooftop solar installations. SPUR is also supporting another bill that would streamline permitting for heat pumps and plug-in solar systems.
“Permitting and inspection delays are these quiet but significant barriers to climate progress,” Corrigan said. The bills SPUR supports are aimed at “removing the friction at these key choke points in electrification,” she said.
But they’re also “rooted in best practices in jurisdictions already doing automated permitting or virtual inspections,” she added, as is happening in at least 19 places statewide, ranging from cities like Los Angeles and San Diego to rural areas such as Placer County in the Sierra Nevada.
Gabe Armstrong, acting chief building official at Placer County’s Community Development Resource Agency, estimated that the agency is eliminating about 3,900 driving miles per year by using remote video inspections. It also offers them on the same day that projects are completed, which is convenient for contractors who don’t want to have to come back the next day just to meet an inspector.
Armstrong’s agency also retains the right to show up in person to check the work, which it does from time to time as part of a quality-control audit, he said. To ensure contractors aren’t misrepresenting their work, “we only do live video inspections,” he said. “We need to know we are at the right jobsite, not looking at some random photo.” If contractors aren’t being honest, “we’ll turn them into the state contractor licensing board — and we’ll ban them from the RVI program.”
Some projects, like new home builds, require on-site visits, he said. And inspectors will still come out in person if the contractor or property owner requests it. But for approved projects like solar panel systems and heating, cooling, and air-conditioning installations, “we have these really large monitors, and we’ll pull up the plans on one side, and we can zoom in and read all the notes — and we can also zoom in on the work being inspected.”
Using video taken from solar installers on rooftops also avoids having to send inspectors up there to check their work, which eliminates safety hazards, Armstrong added. As for contractors, “usually once we get someone doing it, they become a repeat customer,” he said. “Being able to pick the exact inspection time — think about how much money you’re saving.”
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