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.

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.

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.

Putting solar photovoltaic panels on homes and other buildings has proved to be so popular, it’s driving rebate prices down. A record-setting rate of recent solar installations has resulted in rebate stepdowns for the California Solar Initiative.

The Tobacco Road and Research Triangle areas of North Carolina have a decent number of solar homes that sell power back into the grid—about 60--but down in the city of Charlotte there are only one-fourth that number: A mere 15 homes so far. That could change as North Carolina power companies rush to boost the amount of electricity they generate from solar energy by the end of the year, per state law.

The New York Public Service Commission set aside $279 million in incentives over the next five years for small-scale renewable energy projects. About $170 million of the total has been tagged for solar-technology projects. The Commission’s approval came on March 25.