UCLA MAE Professor Rajit Gadh was quoted in the UK Daily Mail article “Californians take a shine to solar power“.

Driving this expansion is the plummeting cost of solar panels — which were traditionally limited to relatively affluent homeowners — and improving technology on batteries to store energy, they add.

“Right now, we’re in throes of rapid change in the solar industry,” said Rajit Gadh, director of the UCLA Smart Grid Energy Research Center. “As people process all the information out there and report their success stories and it starts to become mainstream … the momentum will grow.”

He said apart from cost, another reason average consumers have gingerly adopted solar power in recent years was the dizzying number of regulatory hoops they had to go through to get approval from utility companies and a lot of complicated information to process.