| 英文摘要: | The rooftop solar industry in the United States is experiencing rapid growth. Anna Petherick reports on its progress. Speak to any venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and they will tell you that 'cleantech' has been set to become the next big thing for about a decade. It distracted top firms that could have muscled in on social networking much earlier1. Meanwhile, the headlines around energy generation in the United States have been about the rise of natural gas. Somehow, perhaps because the investment hype seems dog-tired, or because all talk of climate change has gone through periods of political aversion by Washington's elite, the rapid growth of solar power has slipped under the radar. Going on numbers alone, the rise of natural gas is indeed the top story in the country, but solar has recently been the second biggest source of new electricity generation capacity, and its rate of growth has been stunning (Fig. 1).
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