No state or local credits or subsidies. And no net metering. I'd have to pay a hefty monthly fee to my power company with any agreement I make with them to buy my excess power from me at a measly rate. So I don't use that. Basically I'm dependent on the battery storage to get meaningful use out of the excess power I produce in the day.
The only way my system is doing well for me is because I did a lot of study regarding my own power consumption each month across a couple of years, with study on average peak solar hours per month in my area, and weather patterns per month in my area. With the help of my installer, I hammered out the details of a system that best meets my specific needs. IMHO it's not for people who aren't detailed analytical geeks.
Because my wife is retired and I work from home a lot, some of the random appliance usage can happen during the day (when the sun is out) at my house. That means my one inverter can usually handle the load and my batteries still be fully charged when the sun goes down. But that's not like a two parent household with both parents working: no appliance usage during the daytime, but almost all appliances running simultaneously as soon as the two parents get home from work in the evening -- even with full batteries there might not be enough battery storage to run all of them before the sun comes up, and the inverter can't power all of them at the same time without having to get help from the grid. A two parent household with that kind of evening-only power usage (what my household looked like before my kids grew up and moved out and my wife retired), would need much more inverter capacity and battery storage than I have to keep from pulling over half the power from the grid even with a 10 kW system.
And like you suggested, it's probably good only in the south. I'm east of you in Alabama. I hear the humidity in the air here dampens the solar effect more than dry air does for you, but not enough to give more than a moments look.
And Bama has a lot more cloud cover than here in southern AZ. The best months in AZ are May and June, then July sucks because it’s monsoon season, lots of clouds. One thing I learned to watch was the inverter. My inverter gave out after about 5 years and needed replacement. That’s additional cost I didn’t figure on. Good Luck.