Which shows you don’t have to live in a particularly sunny part of the country to make it worth doing.
Waits for the question as to why Texas’ ratio of megawatts to equivalent number of homes powered is so different than a lot of other states
I live in MA, and I’m constantly surprised at how many solar panels I see, relative to how little daylight we get in winter.
There’s a Presbyterian church near my apartment that’s been around since approximately the mid-1800s. Their roof is covered with panels.
California is the only state with enough solar capacity to power a journey through time. And back! And then to 1885!
Which shows you don’t have to live in a particularly sunny part of the country to make it worth doing.
The way the math works out, the cost of electricity from the grid is roughly equal in importance to the amount of sunlight you get. California has the magic combination of high population, lots of sun, and expensive electricity, which explains why it’s so far ahead of everybody else. Its actually even more economical in Hawaii, but they don’t have as many people as California. Places like New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have lots of people and high electricity prices, but not so much sun, which is more or less why they rank where they do.
All of which may have been obvious to you, but it isn’t to everybody.
Of the states listed in the chart, I’m pretty sure Texas and North Carolina have the highest per-capita electricity consumption (going from memory here, but I look at a lot of energy statistics). They are also about even in terms of MW/home. The ratio makes sense to me.
On the other hand, Hawaii is something like second-lowest in per-capita electricity consumption and ends up near the top in MW/home. That’s the ratio that doesn’t make sense to me unless SEIA (the source of the data in the chart) somehow takes into account the island nature of Hawaii.
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