The most important factor for harnessing solar energy is to have good amount of sunshine year-round. Due to the extremely dry environment, desert like areas are the best place to have a good solar panels farm and Arizona ranks to be the N:1 for such power plants. With almost 95% cloud free, sunny days, Arizona can easily power the whole country if the government decides to go environmental.

A plan from the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state‘s regulator of public utilities, will raise Arizona‘s use of renewable energy to 15 percent by 2025. Almost 5 percent of the state‘s energy by that year must come from individual solar projects like rooftop panels. The goal is to make Arizona the first state that is solely powered by free solar energy, but due to the immense costs involved this will most not happen in near future.....

Due to the large investment needed in order to switch to Solar Power, many households prefer to pay the utility companies rather than investing on their own. Normal solar system that can power a single household usually costs around $30k and this makes it quite unprofitable in the short term where in fact the difference in savings on electricity bill will be around 70% - you still need to be hooked up to the grid because solar panels produce energy only during the sunny days. The demand for electricity rises with every year and Energy officials claim that the demand will double by 2025. All new technologies use massive amounts of electricity and this makes us all dependant on it.

The state Department of Commerce published a Solar Electric Roadmap outlining Arizona‘s solar future in January. A committee of representatives from universities, utilities and government set a goal of 1,000 megawatts of solar power generated in the state by 2020, enough to power 250,000 to 300,000 homes. However, even some members of the committee say that goal is not aggressive enough.

State officials are still afraid to push the solar power plan too much since the costs involved are more than anyone can handle. Chairman Mike Gleason said that solar energy is still extremely expensive and currently not profitable. He also said that current technological innovations had drastically reduced the prices and energy conversion, but we are still far from the time when they can become the standard.

Even thou we might not going to be able to see our country solely powered by solar energy, the fact that we have alternative solution to power our daily lives even in situation where all other non-renewable energies are exhausted is a enormous technological breakthrough.