The Government Fix

The Plug-In Solar Movement That Could Lower Your Energy Bills

Release date: October 6, 2026

Host

Guest

Rep. Ray Ward M.D., Ph.D., has served in the Utah House of Representatives since 2015. He serves as the House Chair of the Social Services Appropriations Committee.  He focuses his legislative efforts on medical issues and how to lower the cost of housing. He is a family physician in private practice at Cope Family Medicine/Ogden Clinic. In the 2025 session, he sponsored and passed H.B. 340, which made a pathway for the adoption of plug-in solar panels, and within a year, that bill has triggered a great deal of interest in many other state legislatures around the nation.


What if lowering your electric bill was as easy as plugging something into the wall?

In this episode, Utah State Rep. Ray Ward joins The Government Fix to explain the surprisingly simple idea behind plug-in solar: small solar panels that can power your home or apartment  without contractors, permits, or major renovations—even without homeownership. Already popular across Europe, the technology is gaining momentum in the U.S. as lawmakers rethink outdated rules that stand between people and lower energy costs.

Ray Ward: In my vision, you would go to IKEA, and just as you were walking up and down the aisles, you’d be, “Oh, yes, there’s one of those plug-in solar panels there. Yes, my neighbor up the street had one of those.” Instead of thinking, “I think I want to take out a second mortgage on my home to get solar panels on my roof,” you might think, “I think my wife might like that for a Christmas present.”

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Amanda Renteria: Welcome back to The Government Fix. I’m your host, Amanda Renteria. I’ve worked on Capitol Hill, in the classroom, on Wall Street, and now I’m the CEO of Code for America, an organization focused on using tech to improve public services and make government work well for everyone.

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Have you looked at your energy bill lately? I know I have. It’s so unpredictable, hard to budget around, and the prices seem to just keep going up, but an idea is catching on in the United States that might help just a little bit, and you don’t even need to own a home to get the benefits. This week, I wanted to talk about energy, specifically solar energy. When people think about solar energy, they think about those large, expensive, and hard-to-install panels you might see on a roof, but what if there was another way? Something simpler that might have an installation process similar to a refrigerator, a stove, or a washing machine?

Well, turns out there is an alternative vision for solar energy, and Republican Utah State Representative Ray Ward has it. He’s been a champion of something called plug-in solar. He brought the idea to the Utah legislature, where it passed unanimously. You buy the panel, bring it home, and plug it directly into a standard wall outlet. No permits, no contractors, no utility negotiations required. The system has three parts. There’s a solar panel, an inverter that changes the panel’s power into the kind your home already uses, and a cord that plugs into your wall. Once plugged in, it feeds electricity into your home’s wiring, reducing how much power you pull from the grid.

This form of solar power is already popular in Germany and across Europe, and advocates like Ray Ward have been bringing plug-in solar to the United States. He’s had some success. Right now, eight states have passed laws allowing plug-in solar, and 28 states are considering it. I sat down with Representative Ward to break down how plug-in solar actually works. How it plays to folks on both sides of the political aisle, and how to make solar power as simple as your next IKEA purchase.

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How did you come up with this idea? Where did you first hear about it and become interested in it?

Ray: I read a newspaper story that said, in Germany, you could buy a solar panel and plug it in, and I thought, “How come I can’t buy a solar panel and plug it in here?” It took quite a while to figure it out. At first, I assumed there was some kind of law against it or something like that. That turned out to not be the case. At one point, I finally got a hold of the person in Senator John Curtis’s office who said they would help me out. It was a very short conversation. They said, “I’m here to help you out. I can’t help you at all because it’s not our issue.” They were right.

In the United States, when we buy electrical products, we rely on a thing that just makes us assume correctly that those products will be safe. We have private companies. In the United States, that’s mainly Underwriters Laboratories, but there are a few other pathways as well. Underwriters Laboratories sets safety standards. Then if you want to sell a toaster in the United States, and you haven’t ever sold one before, you have to come in to Underwriters Laboratories and say, “Hey, look, I’ve got a toaster, but it follows your rules of safety for toasters.” They’ll test it, and they’ll say, “Yes. You follow the rules for safety for toasters,” and then I can sell it.

A big-box store like a Walmart or an IKEA, just in general, they don’t have expertise to judge the safety of everything. They only will carry stuff that has been certified as being safe. Once it’s certified, then you can widely sell it, and we know that it’s made in a way that’s safe. Underwriters Laboratories had not yet taken action to make a safety designation for solar panels like this, and so no one could really sell one.

Amanda: Did you connect the two? Is that how that happened?

Ray: It turns out there were a couple of other troubles out there. Just because we hadn’t really expected this, in Utah– I serve in the Utah legislature, so I have some ability– If there’s a Utah law, I have at least the chance to try and change it by proposing a bill there. In Utah, it turned out that we had a law that said, “If you have a solar panel and you are going to connect it to the grid at all, you have to have a contract with your utility before you do that.”

Amanda: That’s a lot of work.

Ray: That makes sense if you’re going to put them all the way across your whole roof, and it makes sense if you expect the utility to pay you anything for that power, then you’re going to have to have a contract that agrees who pays to who, for how much or whatever. In this instance, I’m not asking the utility for anything, and these are a lot smaller than your whole roof-full. Since you’re not asking them for anything, then you shouldn’t have to have a contract with them. The only thing my bill did was take away that requirement and negotiated some with the utilities to make sure they would– They didn’t love the language, but at least they didn’t hate the language.

They didn’t care about the language anymore, so that bill was able to go through. The bill made it clear that people in Utah wanted to have this thing, and that piqued the interest of some of the companies. Every single company who sells these right now today for the last four or five years in Germany would love to sell their same product into a market that’s five times as big here in the United States. Then that at least brought them into the conversation, which they need to be in the conversation. That, to some degree, helped pique the interest or just remind you, well, that people want this, and so we need them to take action and make a safety standard.

It also made legislators in other states realize that their constituents also wanted this, so they got busy looking at their state code. Several other legislators this year in 2026 have also successfully passed some bills through, just to open the pathway up and get started.

Amanda: That’s fantastic. I want to break it down because what you said is fascinating. You had to do two things. One, people needed to know that this was even possible, and then two, legislators needed to know what it was. I want to start with the legislators because these days, we’re always seeking at least bipartisan or nonpartisan, but you got unanimous. That is remarkable always, but especially these days. What was your capability or what was your trick or what was your path?

Ray: For a unanimous bill, there’s two pathways to unanimous bill. One is a topic that everybody knows about, and they have talked about it a lot, and they have all come to a consensus of “This is a great idea.” Then everybody wants to vote for that bill. There’s another probably even more common pathway in which one or two people really care about the bill, and the other legislators aren’t really paying attention to the bill. They don’t know about this, but they don’t know of any reason to vote against it, and so they’ll vote for it. This was not a topic that my colleagues in the legislature knew a ton about.

I was there presenting on it, and they very correctly knew that if the utilities didn’t like it, the utilities would be there telling them that they didn’t like it. Because I had the good fortune really to talk with some engineers at our Rocky Mountain Power utility here and make the changes to the bill so they didn’t oppose it, then the legislators knew that the utilities didn’t care about it. I had a few friends, and I had no enemies, and it went right through.

Amanda: A few friends and no enemies. That is the magic. That is part of the trick.

Ray: Yes.

Amanda: Now let’s talk about the other side, which is the user part of it, so that people can hear about it or know about it, or at least in those conversations you can say, “Listen, people are going to want this,” or “This is something that people could really help with their utility bills right now in the state of Utah or even around the country.” How did you start to really build in that, what we call that client base, to understand what was possible?

Ray: I mean, this is an easy sell. This is a super easy sell, and it really is a bipartisan issue, right? If you think about issues that are coded red and coded blue, the idea of solar panels is often an idea that folks who are more on the Democrat side care about maybe more than the folks on the Republican side. They’re like, “Oh, this is a way to get more solar energy, so I would want this.” On the other side of the coin, if you make the argument to say, “Well, look, I don’t want more government telling me what to do. I would really like for the government to be out of my way and let me take care of my own problems. If I got a way to take care of my own problems, please just trust me and let me take care of them.”

If you’ll get the government out of the way, just trust that people really will take care of their own problems. This issue also speaks exactly to that, because it’s only our regulatory bureaucracies right now that stop us from being able to get these. If we could get those sorted out and people had the option, no one needs a subsidy, no one needs anything. People, especially people living in areas where power costs are really, really high, would really want these. No one has had to give a subsidy in Germany. Their power costs are so high that everybody who can find a way.

A roof full of solar panels in Utah right now, it is probably a 35-year thing to return your investment. Power in Utah is cheap. Solar panels, because of the contract and everything else, are expensive. You really will never get your money back. In Germany, to buy these, people can calculate out that they’ll have their money back in three years and then be saving money after that. Pretty easy.

Amanda: I appreciate the bridge-building nature in which you brought this together, recognizing that there are these different sides. How do you actually make sure that when you’re talking to whatever side you’re on, you’re actually speaking their language? I know that’s hard to do these days, is to be that bridge builder. I’m interested in, did you get any pushback, like, “This is too good to be true. How is this possibly going to happen?”

Ray: I think the pushback was just the concern about safety of people saying, “Well, we don’t have these now, and that’s probably because they’re not safe. I’m a little worried that they’re still not safe.” That’s fair enough. This is a new kind of electrical product. We do need standards for it to be safe. We don’t want to have these used and then have somebody’s house get burned down, but we have the great benefit that they have been used over in Germany now for going on four or five years, and the adoption is pretty widespread.

You can just bring that argument back and say, “Well, look, I’m concerned too, but there’s a whole lot of people who are using them over there and it has worked out okay, so, somehow there’s a way to also get safety standards here and have it work out okay. We just need to start moving in that direction.”

Amanda: This is one of those things that I think when people consider what’s happening in government, that healthy skepticism to say, “Okay, I love the idea, but is it safe?” Then as a legislator, then you figure out how to answer that question. Yes, it might take a little longer to make sure it’s safe, but then when it’s out to scale, there’s a comfort and a foundation that people rely on legislators like you to make sure those boxes are checked as well. You’ve talked a lot about how Germany is doing this, the way they’re doing it.

I want to hear your vision of, let’s say we’re successful in the way that when you first saw this happening, what would it look like in Utah to truly have this implemented in the same way that you envisioned or in the same way that Germany envisioned it happening?

Ray: In my vision, you would go to IKEA and just as you were walking up and down the aisles, you’d be, “Oh, yes, there’s one of those plug-in solar panels there. Yes, my neighbor up the street had one of those.” Instead of thinking, “I think I want to take out a second mortgage on my home to get solar panels on my roof,” you might think, “I think my wife might like that for a Christmas present.” Then you would get it if you wanted it. If you just only look from a monetary perspective, Utah is not the ripest market, so to speak, because our power compared to many other places in the country is relatively cheap.

If it’s only on a monetary basis, it would take us longer to earn that money back, so to speak, compared to our cheap power prices. Everybody might want one, and people should be able to get it if they want it. Places with more expensive power are going to want it more because that’s really expensive power to them that they would love to get a little discount off of. Initially, the ones that will be permitted will be quite small probably, but that’s okay. Just get it started. Get the channel open. You got to get a little stream flowing to get used to what we need to do.

Underwriters Laboratories, again, which makes these safety standards on all of the main products, they have a technical committee that works on it. Once they make a safety standard, it’s not a dead thing where it just stays there forever, especially with a product like this. An initial standard will get up and running. They’ll see some things that need to be changed, see some ways that you could widen the channel. For these panels, there are some things that you need to think about if it’s on what’s called a branched electrical outlet. Many of our electrical lines in our houses have five or six outlets on that same line.

You need to think about some different things that are really important for safety if you’re plugging it in on that line. There will be a pretty– You will not be able to plug six of these in on a standard outlet line and have it still be safe. They’ll need to think that through. If you plug this in on what’s called a dedicated line where there’s only one outlet on that line, which we do already, we already have those for stoves and we have those for dryers and we have those for electrical outlets. Those are already larger wires. If you plug these in on one of those, which are safer because they’re not branched, you could use quite a bit larger ones.

We really easily probably could once we had the safety standards in place, get to the point where if you did want a whole roof of solar panels, you could put in a whole roof of solar panels and plug it into that sort of an outlet when you were done. It’ll just take a while to get there, but we’re working in that direction.

Amanda: Yes, that’s fantastic. You talked about plug-in solar being used across the country in different states. You’ve already made some progress here. You’ve been in different states. How did that happen? Did you reach out? Did they hear about it? How did it become contagious?

Ray: The idea is just such a simple idea and it’s an old idea. When I was talking to the engineers at Rocky Mountain Power and describing it to them, after just 30 seconds, they’re like, “Oh, yes, I know what you’re talking about. Oh, I could make one of those with parts down from Home Depot.” This is not a new technology. It’s an old technology. We’ve known how to do this for a long time. We just haven’t. We just need to get it up and running and then people can see it and understand it. Right now, there’s a pretty high-end product that a lot of people still want and they still buy.

People who go out with their RV to go out camping, they can buy a solar panel and they can plug it in, and they can get a little power from it and they can be out camping and they have a little bit of power. That is so great. They use that power, what? 10 days out of the year? Why should they not be able to make that little bit of power 365 days out of a year? Same panel, just plugging it in.

Amanda: When you talked to other states, were they like, “Yes, we should be doing this here?”

Ray: I didn’t even talk to other states. They were calling me on the phone saying, “Wait, how did you do that?” It’s fun to pass it in a red state first. People were just surprised that it was unanimous. I’ve had a ton of phone calls over the last year of people just wanting to know what was the sequence of events, how did it go down, how could they make it work out? People around the country want this when they hear about it. They were willing to go lobby for it and get changed what we need to get changed to hopefully get it.

Amanda: Now that you are on the frontlines, first, Utah passed its implementation, what are the frontline issues that you are now facing as you’re into implementation? What do you see on the horizon to really break through full-scale use in the state of Utah?

Ray: I guess I would just say, to say full-scale use in the state of Utah to me doesn’t even quite make sense. This is largely a national issue. The biggest issue right now is getting what’s called a final safety standard from underwriters laboratories. That’s by far the biggest issue. When that thing takes place, then in many places, water will really start gushing, and states may still be catching up with some of their rules, but people will want to start buying them, companies want to sell them. There’s a market for them, but having that safety standard is by far the biggest thing.

There’s still a lot of other small places to make progress, and each state that passes a law that makes it clear that their constituents want it and their government wants it, is one more little push to underwriters laboratories to hopefully make them move quicker rather than more slowly. There really are 20 other things that need to happen for it to go full-scale. There’s things in our national electrical codes right now that don’t make sense, that make it a little bit harder than it needs to be. Right now in our national electrical codes, you can have a whole bunch of solar panels that are completely legal, unless you attach them to a rack, and then it’s illegal in the national electrical codes.

Things that were just made back when you were just thinking about it a different way and it got branded with some language that doesn’t make sense, but the national electrical codes typically take five to six years to change. That takes time and it takes energy and it takes people pushing on it, but there’s a lot of little fronts. The biggest one, I think, is getting a safety standard from Underwriters Laboratories.

Amanda: Ray, did you know anything about any of these things before jumping into the plug-ins?

Ray: No. Nothing. [laughs]

Amanda: It’s funny because we do this a lot at Code for America where we walk actually through the process someone has to go through, whether it’s an application or whether it’s just understanding government. It’s not often that I talk to a legislator that actually they themselves have walked through, what does it take to get all the way through a process? The truth is, I think we are at a time right now where new ideas are really coming into contrast with systems, regulations, processes that were put in place a long time ago for a different time. Now we do have emerging technologies in dozens of ways, right?

Ray: Oh, my gosh, in dozens of ways. A lot of times it’s not even emerging technologies. This is not an emerging technology. This is an old technology that we just, “Oh, wait, we did this in a way that made it that we couldn’t do this thing even though we have known how to do it for decades.” There’s all kinds of other things in the building code and in the electrical code in a bunch of places, many times done in the name of safety. Sometimes it’s just a veneer of safety over the top of a company that wants a monopoly interest or a cartel interest that says, “You got to do it this way so it’s safe,” but really they know that it’s only them and two other people that even make that product.

All those things stop us from having products we otherwise could have. They make the things we need like housing much more expensive than it needs to be to build the housing. Going back and thinking through, I want things to be safe, but I really don’t want things that stop me from having useful products or make useful products way more expensive than they should be for no real benefit.

Amanda: One of the reasons I like this idea so much is, for me, it’s foundational to the good life. The idea of things being affordable. Also, I’m curious to hear about, how does it impact our world, the environment? A lot of conversations about the environment, particularly when you talk to any young generation person on both sides of the aisle, there’s a lot of conversation that looks at– My generation, I’m a Gen Xer. My generation and says, “You’ve had sun for a very long time. How did you not figure out how to make that accessible to as many people as possible?” We know the power of it, whether it’s a sunburn or an ability to read, right? You need light for that.

What is the dual impact here when you think about residential energy prices surging 30%? Now, energy is becoming one of the largest household expenses behind gasoline. There’s also this desire to make sure that we’re taking care of our environment, but in the same way we’re utilizing resources that are free and available to everybody. What is the environmental impact of utilizing something like this?

Ray: In a sense, this is the cheapest power you’re going to get. You don’t have to pay anything for the transmission. You don’t have to build a new line somewhere else and cross it clear over the country and fight with 20 different entities. It’s being produced right in the place where you need it. I don’t want my utility to go away, and I do still want to be able to go down to the store and buy food, but also at my own home, if I want to cook something at my own home and make it for myself, I should be able to do that. It’s just nice to be able to take care of your own problems. That’s just a great philosophical way that all of us like to look at things and should look at things.

Amanda: You made me think about when we go camping. We don’t go camping often, but I have to tell you, I love the solar energy. All of a sudden, there’s nothing available, but you might need to charge your phone. The idea of being able to do that is extremely empowering when you’re out camping. Just that idea of feeling that empowerment as well, like, “This runaway cost, I can do something about it.”

Ray: That panel, if you have one that you purchased, you should be able to use it 365 days a year instead of only those 10 days. It would hurt nothing, and it would help a little bit every day if you could just plug that in, and when you want to go camping with it, you would unplug it. You would put it in your car, and you would take it with you.

Amanda: It’s funny because thinking about this next generation, when my son, who turned 16 not too long ago, got his driver’s license and is in the car, he’s like, “Oh, I think I need to take that extra battery solar panel just in case something happens, and I need to call you.” The future generations are already thinking about these renewables around them, and how do they actually utilize these resources that we’ve been seeing for a long time? I’m excited about this. Take me now into the future. What is your hope 5 years from now, 20 years from now, when we look back on this idea that you had?

What does this look like? What does it mean for the country? What does it mean for the next generation on not just, how do they start to utilize solar better, but really the broader message of what kinds of things should they be thinking about in the same way that you’ve brought this to the surface?

Ray: I really hope that five years from now, we have safety standards, both for small ones that you would plug in a regular outlet, as well as safety standards for medium-large ones that you plug into a dryer outlet, and that it was just much more common for people to say, “Oh, yes, of course I would want to have that,” and they just chose to get it and had it, so it wasn’t a strange or weird thing.

You knew that 30% of your street had one because they wanted to have one. Those same folks who on that day when there was a power outage, they didn’t have a power outage. Every company that sells you these panels, also they get a higher profit margin, and they also want to sell you batteries, and they have really good batteries that they can sell you. We also have limited the amount of batteries that we have allowed to sell. Same thing. There are safety standards and National Electrical Code standards that prohibit what can be sold, but we just need to get those worked out. There’s not a reason for that.

Then people can also have that little bit of peace of mind. You don’t need to go buy a diesel generator and pour gasoline into it and hook it up. When there’s a power outage, you have two hours worth of backup or four hours or whatever you have just sitting there in your batteries, and you go over to it and use it.

Amanda: What are some common misperceptions that people have about solar power that you’ve bumped into already?

Ray: In general, the Utah legislature is still, I would say, fairly suspicious about solar power. They contrast it negatively to what– The term we use here is sometimes people say ‘baseline power,’ in Utah, we often say ‘dispatchable power,’ meaning power that is always available to me to turn on and off in the amount I need when I need it. Solar power and wind power at their very point of creation are only available when the sun is up and when the wind is blowing.

We’re getting a lot better with our batteries, so some portion of that problem is solved by having batteries. I think from a Republican perspective, we would say, “Look, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea if you tell me it needs to have a tax credit in perpetuity.” That’s a good idea. Maybe there’s some initial tax credit, but at some point before too long, that idea needs to stand on its own two feet, on its own merit. People need to purchase it just because they want it, and it’s a good product. Those are some of the discussions that we have in the Utah legislature and make changes about it.

In the wide world, I think people have many different motivations. Some people really want to make their own power. Some people really want to not generate CO2. Some people just want to discount off their bill because it’s so expensive to them. Any of those reasons are great reasons.

Amanda: [laughs] That’s part of making things practical and usable and helping people live the good life, is they determine, “Why do I want to do it?” and government actually makes it available in a safe way, makes it possible. That’s what I was so excited about, which is these are the kinds of messages that people need to hear more and more of, which is like, “If you want it, here it is.” Here is a new way that makes it accessible to more people. You don’t have to own a house, to your earlier point. You don’t have to have a lot of money to build something on your roof. You can take it with you.

All those things are just so exciting. I want to ask a little bit of a different question because you’ve now gone through this process and, I would argue, successfully passed something. If you were talking to a future young legislator or a future person who just wants to get something done, what are the lessons you’ve taken away to getting to this moment that you’re in now?

Ray: It’s, I hope if you have tried to be friends to everyone along the way instead of made as many enemies as you could have. Red states and blue states and swing states each have their own dynamics that their own legislators have to figure out how to manage. Every piece of legislation is easier if you have more friends to help you out. This issue is at the very beginning. There’s good momentum for it, but there are several serious hurdles that overall will be overcome, but need to be overcome, and every additional person that asks their legislator for it or says, “Well, I’ve got some technical expertise. I’m going to go talk to the building manager and my code manager in my city who’s giving people crap about it and talk it through with them.”

Amanda: One of the things that I have loved about even our work that we see at Code for America is what’s happened is the best practice sharing is remarkable. You’re right. It might be different languages in one state versus the other state and how you talk about dispatchable energy versus how you might talk about it in a state like California. Maybe you’re talking about it more from the environment perspective. That ability to be in that kind of cohort where you’re just fixing things and you’re just making possibility happen.

Tell me a little bit about how this idea has really put you in the center of that, and what you think that means for the future as well when we think about government from one state to the next.

Ray: When you’re in the legislature, you get two magical things. You get the vote and you can open a bill file, and no one can stop you from opening a bill file. In most government offices, there’s a set job that you do and you are in your very specific lane and you’re under somebody who’s over you and you need to do a good job, but you are just in that one specific lane. In the legislature, you can take a swing at anything that you think is a good idea. You can go take a swing. Then several times after you get a little bit down the road, you’re like, “Oh, that wasn’t a good idea after all. Never mind.”

[laughter]

Every once in a while, you go and you’re like, “Oh, that was a really good idea. I’m really glad I did that.” I’ve never run a bill quite like this. My time I’ve been in the legislature now 12 years, I have not had another bill like this one where it was a national want for this thing that very quickly reflected itself once it got through here in Utah.

Amanda: It’s not just that you get to write a bill there, but when it works, it’s an opportunity to change the country. I think that’s what’s so exciting about this.

Ray: Yes, it is.

Amanda: Our final question that I ask every guest on The Government Fix is, if you could wave a magic wand and change one way the government works, what would it be?

Ray: I really, really wish we had a better way and we took seriously the drawbacks and costs of many of our regulations. Every single regulation that we put in place is done in the name of some noble objective, but I just feel like time and time and time again, we don’t think through the cost. A lot of times, you’ll try and put that idea out there and people will say, “Well, that’s just a little cost. That’s just a tiny cost.” Surely, this health benefit or this safety benefit or this other benefit will be worth that tiny cost.

It’s like, “Well, the straw that broke the camel’s back did not weigh very much, but when you add up a bunch of those over and over and over again, it really does make a lot of things go bad.” Another issue that I care about a lot is housing affordability. I really feel like we have done that over and over and over again. Too many regulations in the name of some small objective that have added it up to make our housing very, very expensive.

Amanda: A magic wand for inefficient regulations.

Ray: I just wish there was a way, too, that people would honestly consider that those costs harm people. Affordable housing that we pour many millions in for affordable housing, it has more regulations that make it expensive than any other thing where you’re like, “Well, you’re not going to shortchange the poor people about this thing or about this thing or about this thing.” In the end, that housing is so massively expensive that very little of it gets built. My magic wand would just make people take seriously those other costs of the regulations somehow.

Amanda: There you go. Well, Ray, I’ve appreciated you being on this podcast, but I appreciate even more the ideas that you’re bringing to government and to making people’s lives better. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Ray: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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Amanda: Here at Code for America, we’re really interested in people’s experience, understanding their needs and what barriers stand in their way. In the case of energy, there are multiple parties that need to be considered, from folks in their homes, to the businesses impacted by solar installation rules, to the people in local government who may or may not know much about the technology itself. Knowing the facts and communicating with each other is key. When I look toward the future, I want us to keep looking for examples of when things really work for people. Some say client-centric.

With all the talent in this country, in this world, it’s examples like these that remind us we can innovate for the good of the people, all people, while also solving for affordability and the needs of the overall community. Speaking with folks like Ray Ward, who work across the aisle to turn these big ideas into policy, is what our work at Code for America is all about. It’s about listening to what people want and making small changes so a family can live an affordable life. No barriers, no bureaucracy, and a process that feels as easy as basking in the sunshine.

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Amanda: This podcast is brought to you by Code for America, the country’s leading civic tech nonprofit for over 15 years. We believe that government can work for the people, by the people, in the new digital age. We work with government at all levels across the country to make the delivery of public service better with technology. We partner with community organizations and governments to build digital tools, change policy, and improve programs. Our goal, a resilient government that works well for everyone. Learn more at codeforamerica.org. 

Want to learn more about how government can actually work for everyone? Like or subscribe to The Government Fix wherever you get your podcasts, or visit us at thegovernmentfix.org.  

If you liked what you heard and want to support our mission, visit codeforamerica.org/donate. We’re committed to building a future where government services are simple, accessible, and easy to use, just like you’ve been hearing about this season.

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