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A Guide to Decommissioning of Solar Sites

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your solar bonding needs. Why Is a Decommissioning Plan Needed? In most jurisdictions, a project owner applying for a permit to construct a solar generating facility must provide a decommissioning plan. Without a decommissioning plan, these jurisdictions will not issue a permit in the first place. Decommissioning a solar generating facility includes dismantling the equipment and returning the site to its original condition, may involve tasks including: Removing rack wiring Removing panels Dismantling racks Removing electrical equipment Breaking up and removing concrete pads or ballasts Removing racks Removing cables Removing ground screws and power poles Removing fencing Transporting materials from the site Grading the site Seeding/replanting disturbed areas There are costs associated with these tasks. What Does a Decommissioning Plan Include? A decommissioning plan typically is developed by, or at least reviewed by, a qualified engineer and includes such information as: The anticipated useful life of the solar generating facility to be constructed The estimated cost of decommissioning in terms of present value...

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Solar Bond Demand Goes Up

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your solar bonding needs. Is the Demand for Solar Energy Still Growing? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that the demand for solar energy has been increasing steadily and, with the incentives created by recent legislation, is poised for explosive growth. One sure benchmark for growing demand for solar power in the residential market is the increasing popularity of solar bonds as an investment vehicle. These are financial securities, debt instruments, backed by loans made by financing companies—not to be confused with solar surety bonds (more on those in a minute).  Investors are buying up solar bonds because they view the growth of the solar energy industry as an attractive investment opportunity with excellent potential for profit. Drivers of Solar Energy Demand For a long time, demand for solar energy was primarily the result of concerns about the environmental impact of emissions from burning fossil fuels. Now, there also are substantial financial incentives for moving toward electricity generated from...

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Community Solar Subscription Management Surety Bonds

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your solar bonding needs. What Is Community Solar? According to the U.S. Department of Energy, community solar is “any solar project or purchasing program, within a geographic area, in which the benefits of a solar project flow to multiple customers such as individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and other groups.” Typically, the energy producing those benefits is being generated by solar panels at an off-site array. Community solar customers have the option of buying or leasing a subset of the solar panels in the array and receiving a credit on their electric bill for the power generated by those panels. Not everyone can have solar panels installed on their own roof, usually because they are renters rather than homeowners, or because their home is not well situated in terms of exposure to sunlight, or because of the design or size of their roof, or for financial reasons. Community solar allows these folks to participate in and benefit from solar energy generation, nonetheless. There also are...

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Remote Construction Management Trends

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Continue reading to learn more about remote construction management trends. For a very long time, construction management meant spending all day on a single job site or traveling from one site to another to check on progress and stomp out small fires before they could become big ones—not exactly an efficient approach to project management. In an industry slow to embrace digital technologies, it only became widely apparent that the physical presence of a project manager onsite might not be necessary when the pandemic turned the way Americans work upside down. Increasingly, digital technologies used to improve construction processes are being deployed as project management tools, and many construction project managers spend far less time onsite than previously was thought necessary. Top Remote Construction Management Trends Digital Time Tracking At the most basic level, construction project management is about making sure that people show up to work when and where they’re supposed to and remain as long as they are...

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Protective Gear: Construction Trends

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Continue reading to learn more about protective gear construction trends. The range of protective gear (personal protective equipment, or PPE) available for use in the construction industry continues to expand with new developments in PPE technology and enhanced safety requirements imposed by government entities, employers, project owners, and insurance companies. The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the need for additional PPE (for example, N95 masks) to help in disease prevention when infection rates are high. Top Protective Gear Construction Trends Fit and Comfort Proper fit plays a big part in the effectiveness of construction protective gear. There is a direct correlation between the comfort of PPE and compliance with rules and regulations regarding the use of PPE. Comfort goes hand-in-hand with fit as PPE design criteria because workers may not wear PPE properly or adjust the fit properly if the item is uncomfortable. So, there is ongoing research and development to come up with PPE that can be adjusted for...

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Construction Recruitment Trends

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Continue to read to find out more about construction recruitment trends. The Current Labor Shortage The demand for new workers in the construction industry has been greater than the potential supply for years, and that trend continues in the COVID-19 era. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Construction activity was stagnant through most of 2021 but is likely to pick up with government-funded infrastructure spending. To be competitive moving forward, construction companies need to acquire and/or develop talent that has the right combination of skills for the work to be done. They also need to have a diverse workforce that is in line with what both private and public project owners are looking for. And they need to be able to attract and retain workers in a highly competitive hiring environment. The Right Mix of Skills Generations of construction workers were hired for their technical skills and experience. But there is a growing recognition of the need for...

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Changes for OSHA Construction Requirements in 2022

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Continue reading to learn more about changes for OSHA in construction requirements for 2022. The Biden administration has been working in multiple industries to reinstate rules and regulations revoked during the Trump administration. There also are ongoing efforts to implement some regulations and enforcement strategies originally proposed during the Obama administration, as well as some that previously had not made it past the discussion stage. Many of these developments directly impact the construction industry and OSHA’s safety regulations. Rebuilding OSHA During the Trump administration, many OSHA positions, especially for inspectors and senior administrators, were eliminated or went unfilled. With the goal of increasing safety inspections and enforcement, one key move is to reinstate the Site-Specific Targeting Inspection Program that subjects high-risk worksites and businesses that have not complied with existing reporting requirements to more frequent inspections. Enhancing Recordkeeping Requirements In early 2022, OSHA proposed amending certain recordkeeping regulations to match more closely what was initially envisioned by the Obama administration....

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Building Information Modeling (BIM) Trends

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Continue reading to learn more about building information modeling BIM trends. What Is Building Information Modeling? Autodesk defines Building Information Modeling (BIM) as “a process of creating and managing information for a built asset throughout its lifecycle—from planning and design to construction and operations.” It brings together real estate developers, architects, engineers, construction contractors, suppliers, and others in a collaborative process of planning, designing, and building a single 3-dimensional model that all parties use as the basis for work at every stage before, during, and after construction. Among the most impactful trends in BIM today are the use of 3-D printing, 3-D laser scanning, prefabrication, energy modeling, and cloud computing. 3-D Printing Using BIM data and 3-D printing eliminates the need for multiple drawings, plans, and models of a building to be constructed. The three most common 3-D printing technologies used in BIM—Stereolithography, Selective Laser Sintering or melting, and Fused Deposition Modeling—differ primarily in the type of material or the technique...

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Trends in Construction: Smart Contracts

Surety Bond Professionals is a family owned and operated bonding agency with over 30 years of experience. With access to a broad range of surety markets, our expert agents are ready to assist with all of your bonding needs. Read on to learn more about smart contracts. Several potential benefits are driving the move to replace traditional paper construction contracts with smart contracts. Chief among these benefits are the ability to automate contractor payments and the increased security and transparency derived from the fact that once finalized, a smart contract cannot be altered. What Is a Smart Contract? IBM defines smart contracts (also known as chaincode) as “software that you can use to read and update data on the blockchain ledger. Chaincode can turn business logic into an executable program that is agreed to and verified by all members of the blockchain network.” The business logic related to a construction contract includes what each party to the contract is promising to deliver and the terms and conditions of the contract. Capturing this business logic as code on a blockchain yields substantial benefits in terms of streamlining transaction processing and auditing and eliminates a lot of manual processing and paperwork....

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