Going solar in Tucson

I am always amazed there is not more use of solar power going on here in Tucson. The average day is sunny. Almost all days are sunny. You can power your house, business, you can make your electric meter spin backward. A solar house setup featured in a recent episode of This Old House in Austin, Texas detailed a system that costs 18,000 dollars- I think this was after incentives had cut the original cost 40 to 50 percent.

Today's article in the AZ Daily Star got me thinking about Arizona in solar circles. The house is a "showcase" home, at a quarter of a mil, but generates all its own energy and harvests water. When it rains here, it really rains, so if you're clever you can water you gardens with what you harvest. But the point is, the more people that go to the trouble of outfitting their homes to face the future, the cheaper it will become.

To say that it pays for itself is important. To say that it's necessary, if we are not going to exterminate our own species with pollution from coal burning power plants, is a more important point.