This past spring, 12 solar panels installed last year atop the Ypsilanti, Michigan, City Hall were wired to the building and began generating electricity. A group of volunteers from the Ypsilanti Food Co-operative and SolarYpsi installed the panels. They had won state grants to put solar panel on the Food Co-op, City Hall and the Co-op’s River Street Bakery.

Maine is sweetening the pot to try to get homeowners to make their homes more energy efficient this summer. The state is offering a $1,000 cash bonus for home energy improvements completed by August 31, 2010, according to the Morning Sentinel. The new incentive is in addition to the $3,000 cash incentive that has been in effect since January to homeowners of all income levels, as well as up to $1,500 in federal tax credits.

Homeowners are starting to go solar in the Quad Cities area encompassing parts of Illinois and Iowa across the Mississippi River from each other.

Recently, Oregon announced a new solar program in which utilities will pay premium rates to people for generating solar power with small-scale systems.

While oil continues to gush out of BP’s busted well in the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana legislators are pushing at least three bills to help renewable energy, including solar power.

You might think of Washington and the Pacific Northwest as a bad place to put solar panels on your roof—but you’d be wrong.

The CEO of a digital media firm in Upper Arlington, Ohio, always thought about going solar, but it wasn’t until recently that it made economic sense.

Green solar jobs have arrived in the Hudson River Valley of New York. SpectraWatt, a company that produces silicon photovoltaic cells for solar panels, held a grand opening last week at its factory in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., not far from Poughkeepsie.

This week the Garden State launched Funding Cycle 2 of its Renewable Energy Incentive Program. The initiative offers incentives--in the form of rebates--for solar electric/photovoltaic, wind and sustainable biomass systems for residential, non-residential and newly constructed buildings.

Corporations and government agencies seem to be competing to see who can host the largest solar power system in Tennessee. In the latest case of one-upsmanship, Nashville’s Metro Housing and Development Authority put up solar panels with a total capacity just a bit greater than the solar system atop a shopping mall in Hendersonville.