To the editor:

Mr. Coan needs to do a little more research about becoming a “solar power capital” like Lancaster, Calif. (Public Forum, May 31). Lancaster is in the Mojave Desert. It boasts 350 days of sunshine a year, and that is pretty accurate.

Here in Lawrence, we can boast no such thing, and we haven’t, by any stretch, the same conditions for doing so. I spent the first 51 years of my life in California, 13 of them in Lancaster, another 17 years in the Central Valley of California, and 20 years along the coast.  The conditions of any of those areas are quite dissimilar from here. 

If you want to be more energy efficient here, stop building homes and other structures that are constructed more for California-like weather, and construct them for Midwest conditions. Built right once, they’ll forever cut the use of all energy resources, and maybe even make solar power, as it now exists, a little helpful.