With more than 350 days of sunshine a year, Palm Springs turned out to be the perfect place for people to revolutionize the energy markets by outfitting homes and businesses with palm springs solar panels. Flying into Palm Springs airport you are almost blinded by the shiny, bluish silver hue of solar cells linked together on rectangle-shape panels that lay flat on the roof of homes and buildings. Each solar cell only emits a few watts of energy but collectively they can generate a large amount of kilowatts. Palm Springs, a city that was once perpetually stuck in the mid-century décor with many of its homes awash in the Spanish-style, rust-colored, clay tiled-roofs, now has a hint of the future thanks to the metallic-like structures that adorn many rooftops and businesses.

Palm Springs Solar Panels Affect City Tapestry

The city, which has become a hotbed for solar energy projects as well as wind-induced energy projects, is experiencing an aesthetic transformation that is barely registered by its residents. And at first glance, a visitor may find the mix of Palm Springs solar panels and the sophisticated modernist architecture of Palm Springs residential areas to be somewhat incongruent. And that first assumption may seem correct.

Designed mostly in the boxy, sharp-angled architectural style known as mid-century modern, Palm Springs is a city that had always had a classically modern look. The city is world renowned for this style of architecture which features low, sometime swooping roofs and windows that stretch from the floor to the ceiling. The look is completed with the post-and-beam style (think Stonehenge) of the many homes created by developer Alexander Holmes.

The idea of adding futuristic, shiny square panels to this style of architecture may seem a little odd. After all, Palm Springs’s architecture is distinctly embedded in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet, the city has managed to make it work.

Palm Springs Solar Panels Blend In

Unlike the swirling white of wind turbine blades that stick out like white rockets whirling across a blue sky, solar panels have blended into the natural landscape of Palm Springs and other cities in the Coachella Valley, where solar energy projects are plentiful. Even though most solar panels are constructed basically the same way they were in the 1950s, advances in solar panel design technology have created panels, which are mostly made of silicone, that are much thinner than their counterparts. These thinner panels are more aesthetically pleasing, blending in more with the natural landscape.