A group of pro-solar people are returning a solar panel to the White House tomorrow, September 10, and hope to convince President Obama to Put Solar on the White House roof.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed a law August 17 requiring power utilities to get 6 percent of their energy from solar in 2015 and every year thereafter.

The Lone Star State may be best known for its oil industry, but it also leads the nation in one renewable energy and has the potential to do a lot more.

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.

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.

Arizona Cuts Solar Incentive Amount Because Program Is So Popular

Despite the down economy, demand for solar-power installations has been so large it threatened to drain Arizona’s solar rebate fund by June. So the Arizona Public Service Co. (APS) moved to reduce the amount of each rebate, in order to make the fund last longer and to provide solar incentives to more people. More APS home and business customers put solar panels on their roofs last year than in the previous eight years combined, and about 113 residential customers a week have applied for solar rebates from the utility this year, according to the Arizona Republic. The APS has proposed cutting its solar rebate from $3,000 per kilowatt to $2,150 a kilowatt.

Kaiser Permanente to Install Solar Panels at 15 Sites in California

Health care giant Kaiser Permanente announced March 30 that it has made a deal with Recurrent Energy to put solar panels on buildings at 15 Kaiser sites across California. All told, the panels will generate 15 megawatts of power—or what approximately 11,000 homes use in any given instant. Each site will receive about 10 percent of its power from the rooftop panels. Recurrent will install the solar panels and Kaiser will spend $95.6 million over 20 years for power from the panels. That amount is about the same, or a little less, than buying electricity from the grid at today’s prices. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Kaiser wants to use on-site, sustainable energy for 25 percent of its electricity needs by the year 2020.

The outlook for solar power in California just got sunnier. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation February 26 that raises the cap on the amount of customer-generated solar power utilities must reimburse through net-metering credits. Net-metering allows homes and businesses to receive credits if they generate more solar power than they can use. In effect, the customer sells the excess power to the electric grid and gets credit for it.