Georgia pecan grower Trey Pippin now harvests more than nuts—he’s also generating electricity from a one-acre solar farm on his property.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.