by Christopher Mims. While the drill-baby-drill contingent was bitching about reliance on foreign oil, that hacky-sack full of smelly Nancy-Pelosi-electing hippies known as California quietly installed more solar in 2010 than any other state, ever. The numbers: Californians installed 194 megawatts of solar in 2010, 47 percent more than they installed in 2009. Granted, 2009 was kind of a crap year, economically. But so was 2010! This power is distributed: California now has nearly 1 gigawatt of solar spread across almost 10,000 sites. The cost of distributed, small-scale solar in California has fallen 18 percent since 2007, and almost 30 percent for large projects. Applications to California's solar subsidy program indicate that 2011 will be an even bigger, more record-breakinger year. The ultimate goal is 1,940 MW of solar capacity by 2016.

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