Stay on Top of Emerging Technology Trends Get updates impacting your industry from our GigaOm Research Community

Solar power technology is proliferating across the U.S. as costs drop and awareness grows. (Check out these charts to see solar’s amazing growth last year.) But the political atmosphere for solar power varies greatly state to state.

To help navigate the landscape, clean energy advocacy group Solar Power Rocks released its 2013 rankings for states’ commitment to solar power. The group ranked states based on a methodology that factors in five years’ of data regarding solar incentives, policy, infrastructure and metering, and assigned states a letter grade based on how easy or difficult it is to go solar.

We mapped out their rankings and it seems, not surprisingly, that the possibility for solar power is most promising in pockets of the Southwest and Northeast, while the South trails far behind. For more about the state of the solar market, see our solar coverage.