California Solar Power

Several renewable energy enthusiasts around the world already know how California is the foremost U.S. state in solar energy panels with the capability of over 500 megawatts of solar power system. California is also the home to the world's major solar power plant, the 354 MW SEGS thermal power plant. In the previous ten years or so the climb of solar panel installations in California has been amazing, just decade before California had only around 500 solar panel installations, and nowadays California has close to 50,000 solar panel installations.

California is really setting up the standards all through the U.S. in solar power systems use by constantly increasing its total solar capacity. If we for instance look at the data for 2008 we can see that in 2008 the solar capability in California grew by a third from 2007. In fact, California is so leading in solar capacity that its current solar capacity represents about two-thirds of the total U.S. solar capacity.

There are many reasons for such enormous growth of solar industry in California. It does not only have to do with exploring understandable natural compensation of having enough Sun throughout the whole year or with the fact that by using solar power generator we can make our planet more green since we would require less fossil fuels use in our total energy demand. One of the major factors that contributed to marvelous growth of solar power systems in California is also statewide program that provides different financial incentives and rebates to encourage people to install solar panels electricity. You could say that some other countries are also offering these incentives but the difference in this case is that California is doing this for more than a decade while other countries have just started funding solar energy panels projects.

Other states are far behind California in installed solar capability, for instance the second best is New Jersey that has installed around 70 MW of solar capacity, which is less than 15 % of California Solar capacity. States like Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado have even more infectious up to do, if they want to get closer to California's solar capacity.

The year 2009 was a bad year from financial point of view, and this has also reflected on solar power sector since credit crisis dried up funding for new solar energy panels projects. But even in such dark financial conditions California is still well on path to more than double its influence generated by solar panel installations in 2009. This means that California will install around 350 megawatts of solar systems in 2009, which is approximately three times more than in the rest of the United States.

With such progress in commercial solar installation even the newest California's goal of achieving 33 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2020 doesn't seem impractical. On the contrary