Solar Power 2007

Well, I'm most of the way through this year's Solar Power 2007 Conference and Exposition, and am overall pretty impressed with the offerings and the attendance. Apparently there was something like 8,000 attendees pre-registered, and another 1,000 or so that came without registration (don't quote me on those figures, that's what they announced).
There were all sorts of exhibits and booths, run by the various companies that are trying to gain a foothold in the burgeoning US solar industry; the really interesting thing was that unlike a lot of the exhibitions that get run on US soil, there was a very large contingent of foreign participation. Germany and Spain are really the big solar power markets right now, with Germany's industrial base installing something like 40% of the world's solar energy production last year. However in the long run, the US is in a far better natural position to take advantage of solar power:
As you can tell, the southwest US is an excellent area; we're just faced with lots of challenges as far as distribution (transmission), regulation, carbon-tax and/or renewable energy incentives, high capital costs, and a myriad of other issues plaguing the US solar industry. Most of these issues are being addressed actively by literally hundreds of companies from a dozen countries; so it's nobody fault but ours if the US doesn't get its piece of the pie from the get-go.