How does your state stack up against all the other states in the country when it comes to being solar friendly? Solar Power Rocks, an online solar power resource site, rates every state every year based on 11 criteria, then translates those rankings into an interactive chart. Each state gets an overall grade based on the data. For this year, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, Washington, DC, New York, Oregon, and Connecticut all got an A rating. Louisiana and 8 other states got an F.
Let’s take a look at the factors Solar Power Rocks considered when ranking the states for 2018. Methodology is important if anything like this is to have any credibility. These rankings are not some seat-of-the-pants, back-of-an-envelope guesstimates put together during a late night pub crawl, but instead required a great deal of detailed research.
50% of the 2018 rankings are based on the policies each state has in place to support solar power. Solar Power Rocks describes them this way. “Policy is one of the major categories that we use to determine how solar will fare in a state. All told, the 5 policy factors make up 50% of our weighting system. Good solar policy is like the bedrock of the future energy landscape — with a strong bunch of laws and regulations in place, you can be sure a state will be favorable for solar long into the future.” There are five factors in this category.