Living in Arizona for so many years there are still alot of cities I have not been to, however one that I have spent a lot of time in is beautiful Prescott Arizona.  If you have not been to Prescott, you have to go and visit!  From the beautiful scenery driving from the valley, to the fun and exciting Whiskey Row, to the neighboring cities that you can see like Jerome.

In the news it seems some exciting things are happening in Prescott Valley.  It seems that the builder Mandalay Homes is building 2900 homes that will be equipped with solar and battery backup systems.  This will allow these residence living here to capitalize on all the AZ sun earlier in the day and then utilize the solar.  You would think this sort of subdivision would be alot more popular here in sunny Arizona, however it seems to have taken off slowly over the years.  Why is that?  Do people find it too expensive… too complicated and not worth the effort?  It seems that with utility companies, like APS, it seems that one challenge is those that utilize solar, utilize it at the same time (earlier in the day) and then turn to then using the utilities at the same time in the day right when it is peak with those that are not using solar (they call this duck curve issues).  This new development is hoping that  implementing the use of batteries (post solar) will help alleviate this “duck curve” by not having such a heavy dependency on using the utility company when usage amongst non solar users, it also on it’s peak.  Stay tuned to see how this development goes and maybe it is something new for future builders to help increase the usage of solar here in AZ.  Congrats Prescott Valley!