ma i married a tuna posted:

I'm not quite sure why no one is offering anything useful in this thread yet, but this idea seems viable. The notion that solar panels require more energy to produce than they deliver over the course of their lifetime is no longer true, and their purchase cost is no longer prohibitive. Obviously, location is a factor, but you could legislate for that - factor in yearly sun-hours, and environment obstruction. I can't imagine why this would not be cost- and energy effective all over the southwest, for example.

You would need to put into place a maintenance program, since solar panels lose efficiency with partial obstruction (bird poo poo etc) but that hardly seems prohibitive.