California may be the Golden State, but it’s New Jersey where U.S. residents get the best deal on their solar power systems, new research shows.

A survey by Global Solar Centertried to give an “apples to apples” comparison for the cost of solar power in all 50 states, the center’s chairman Jack Hidary told Reuters.

The common denominator turned out to be the cash payback, or how many years it would take a residential or commercial customer to recoup their investment and start seeing real savings, Hidary said.
“That takes into account the cost of the system, the sun at that spot, the incentives of that region, utility rates. It blends in everything all together,” Hidary said.

The center analyzed the date using new software and found that New Jersey had the fastest payback — 1.5 years — for residential systems, followed by New York and Delaware with paybacks of three and six years, respectively. California tied for fourth place with Maryland, Massachusetts and Wisconsin, all with payback hitting seven years.

Rankings changed when the center looked at commercial solar power systems.

For commercial projects, Colorado, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Ohio and Oregon all share the top spot, with a 1.5 year payback time, according to the survey.

The center also found that solar hot water systems have a one-year payback in sourthern Texas and Florida.

“To put this all in context, five years ago you couldn’t find a state with less than a 10 or 15 year payback,” said Hidary, who also is a board member of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He said the steep fall in solar panel prices and more government incentives have helped speed up the return on investing in a solar power system.

Halloween is just around the corner, and it may be better than most years for one of Earth’s most unpopular species: the bat. 

Something sinister is happening to bats in the United States — not only are their numbers declining due to a mysterious malady, but large numbers of them are also being caught mid-flight in the spinning wind turbines that are cropping up rapidly across the nation.

The furry flying critters may get help this month thanks to an unlikely group of conservationists, wind energy companies and the U.S. government, who say they are undertaking a big effort to lower the number of bats killed by wind turbine blades.

The group, called the Bats and Wind Energy Cooperative, is studying whether stopping wind turbines during low wind conditions will reduce bat deaths at U.S. wind farms. It is also evaluating how much electricity is lost by the shutdowns.

The effort to curb bat fatalities at U.S. wind farms comes as wind power is expanding and North American bat populations are in decline due to a mysterious illness known as White-nose Syndrome. 

Conservationists have long worried about the danger of birds colliding with wind turbines, though some studies have shown that the number of birds that die from hitting turbine blades is low compared with kills from vehicles or buildings.  The bat study “represents a new area of investigation for the wind industry,” according to Andrew Linehan of Iberdrola Renewables, which offered its Casselman Wind Power Project site in Pennsylvania for the experiment.

According to the BWEC, bat fatalities occur mainly on nights when the wind is scarce and turbines are operating at low power. Scientists believe, therefore, that shutting down the turbines when there is little wind could significantly reduce bat deaths with only a modest reduction in power production.

The group also said that though bats are “often ignored and falsley besmirched,” they “are vital to the health of the environment” because they are pollinators and seed dispersers in addition to predators of agricultural pests.

The BWEC was formed in 2004 by Bat Conservation International, the American Wind Energy Association, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory.