How do I adjust ITC level that gets populated in my Analyses?
The US Federal ITC level has been set to step down to lower percentages on January first of various years. The start of 2021 was initially supposed to drop from 26% to 22%, but the Federal government's actions and in-actions have made this questionable. When an ITC (or any other incentive) is about to change, and you want new proposals to incorporate the new assumptions, you will want to adjust your Project default Project Settings to auto-populate the new assumptions.
Administrative Changes
There are two aspects of your SolarNexus administrative configuration related to this change:
- Change the default Federal ITC to the new expected Federal ITC for Analysis
- Modify Finance Program Payment Factors (where required)
1. The first is a quick update. Just go to Admin > Project Settings > Analysis Parameters. Under "Incentives" section, find the current Federal ITC incentive and using the drop-down selector, change it to the newer version. When you change the version, the eligible service types will be removed. Then click in the eligible Service Types box and select the types of services that are eligible for the ITC (i.e "Grid-Tie PV"). Remember that Energy Storage and Main Service Panel Replacements are also eligible if installed with PV.
2. For the Finance Program payment factors, this depends on what your finance programs are doing for the transition. Unsecured loan programs that allow payment of the ITC will almost certainly require changes to the payment factors for term 2, and maybe for term 1. Refer to this help article on how to setup payment factors for your finance programs.
As always, save yourself any headaches by testing your updates on a new customer solution. Verify that the ITC is populating properly, and that the monthly loan payment estimates are calculating as expected.
Individual Project Solution Changes
Once your administrative changes are made, all new project solution analyses will use these new values by default.
However, during the transition period your staff may have solutions already in development that they want to switch to using the lower ITC rate.
If your solution was created prior to the administrative change, SolarNexus will not update the analysis assumptions in any way regardless of any changes to administratively set default values. So if you have an existing solution with the 26% tax credit, and you want to change it to use the 22% percent tax credit, you'll need to manually adjust the incentives for that solution.
Go to the solution's Analysis screen and open its Analysis Parameters. Click on the Incentives section. You can click the "X" icon to delete the existing tax credit. Then click Add Incentive button to get select the newer ITC. Be sure to select the applicable services in your solution that the ITC "Applies To" box.