Putting solar panels on your roof may be all the rage in California, but what’s a green homeowner to do in less sundrenched parts of North America?

How about powering your home or business with wind, for starters. And no, that doesn’t mean planting a 100-foot-tall wind tower in your backyard.

This week, Grand Rapids, Michigan-based Cascade Engineering launched a wind turbine aimed at residential and business customers. According to Jessica Lehti, the company’s senior sales and marketing manager, the Swift Wind Turbine is as soft as a whisper and fits on the side of buildings, making it “more zoning compliant” for urban and suburban settings.

The drawback for most of us will unfortunately be the product’s cost. The Swift turbine carries a price tag of $10,000, including installation, and is unlikely to rid you of your utility bill entirely.

“It’s really a supplemental system,” Lehti said, adding that it would provide about one-fifth of an average American home’s energy needs. For more conservation-conscious customers, that could go up to about 40 percent.

Depending on state tax incentives, regional electricity rates and the average wind speed at its location, it could take anywhere from 3 years to 40 years for the turbine to pay for itself, Lehti said.

The good news? A federal tax incentive that will go into effect in January could give residential customers a $1,000 credit per system, with commercial customers getting up to a $4,000 credit, Cascade said. Those tax breaks should help the small wind turbine market grow between 18 percent and 20 percent through 2010, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

The turbine went on sale on Monday, and there is already a backlog of orders, Lehti said, mostly from business customers. The company expects the backlog to be cleared by February as it ramps up production.

The Swift turbine was developed by Scotland’s Renewable Devices. The product has been available in the United Kingdom for a few years.

The quest for more renewable energy sources recently got a boost that’s out of this world.

NASA researchers this week said they are using global satellite data to create maps of ocean areas best suited for wind energy.

The maps will be useful in planning where to build offshore wind farms that can convert wind energy to electricity, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Islands of floating wind farms have the potential to generate 500 to 800 watts per square meter, according to research conducted by Tim Liu, a senior research scientist at the JPL.

“No group of people have measured the amount of wind power over the entire ocean. Now for the first time we have a map,” Liu said in an interview. “You can actually quantify how much power is in what place. The map gives you this tool for where to place these (wind) farms.”

NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite tracks the power, speed and direction of ocean wind using a specialized microwave radar.  Created in 1999, the QuikSCAT is normally used for predicting storms and checking the accuracy of weather forecasts.

Offshore wind farms are one answer to critics’ claims that towering wind turbines disturb wildlife habitats and spoil landscapes. Also, the wind blows stronger over the ocean because it doesn’t have hills, mountains or buildings blocking its way.

The challenge of moving the electricity from the middle of the ocean to utility customers on land, however, is formidable and costly. A spat over plans to build a wind farm off the coast Massachusetts’ Cape Cod is playing out now, with state and local authorities arguing over a burying the electric cables needed to connect the farm to the power grid.

NASA’s satellite maps reveal that the best areas to construct ocean wind farms are in the mid-latitude regions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, including off the California coast.

To see an image of the QuikSCAT wind map, click here.

– Reporting by Jennifer Martinez