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.

Today President Obama is in the San Francisco area and will visit the Solyndra solar panel production factory in Fremont, California. Obama will discuss jobs and the economy while at Solyndra. In recent days he has said that the United States needs to boost its support of renewable energy sources, so that China doesn’t own the alternative energy market.

Down in the Sunshine State, Governor Charlie Crist plans to hold a special session of the state legislature to address the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to oil, he wants to focus on renewable energy policies, especially those that do not raise electricity rates or energy costs—including measures such as solar rebates and solar incentives.

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.

New Eni-MIT Energy Center Focuses Solely on the Sun

Last week the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened a new solar-energy research center. Named the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center, it is funded largely with a grant from Italian energy giant Eni. According to Boston.com, students and faculty will tackle problems such as how to put solar cells on flexible, inexpensive material such as paper; how to use water to store solar energy; and how to make solar panels more efficient.

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.

Pokeberries Prove to Be Valuable in Solar Panel Production

Scientists at Wake Forest University have discovered that pokeberry dye can improve the efficiency of some solar cells. When applied to fiber-based solar cells, the berry's dye acts as an absorber, helping the cell's fibers capture more sunlight to convert into power. Fiber-based solar cells can produce twice as much power as current flat-cell technology and are less expensive to produce. Civil War soldiers used juice from the weeds to write letters home, reports UPI.com.