>>baking hot Arizona summer without A/C.
Has there ever been a baking hot summer in AZ without lots of sunshine? Heck there is lots of sunshine there in January, which is why they don’t bother with ‘daylight savings’. Such places make more sense for solar than any other in the country.
I agree about mid-continent winters, and Florida/SE Atlantic/gulf coast states, more because of the inherent fragility of solar panels when hurricanes arrive.
Coastal areas are kind of bad for things like windmills and solar panels. I can't resist telling this story (anecdotal, but true) about one of my Mom's neighbors on the East Coast who thought he'd "beat" the local utility by putting up both a windmill and ground-level solar panels. Wasn't a bad bet, plenty of wind at the shore and the total sunny days wasn't bad. So he put them up. Worked okay until his neighbors (not my Mom) got a court order to shut down his windmill. Too much noise, blocking sunlight, "flicker", etc. So that one fizzled out. Then a few years later a hurricane came up the coast and washed his solar panels away. The guy wasn't too sorry to see that happen because by then he was getting a little arthritic and tired of cleaning the sand and seagull poop off of the panels. So he took his insurance settlement and lived a happy life back on the grid, which in that area was supplied by a nuclear plant a few miles up the road that has something like a 90+% capacity factor (i.e., is very, very reliable and safe).