The Griffin Neighbors blog has a detailed post about Solarize Thurston, local non-profit Thurston Energy's new program to help groups of people in neighborhoods buy and install solar equipment. (In addition to getting help with the process, you can save 15% to 25% of the usual costs by doing this as part of a group.) The post discusses the additional current incentives for installing solar on your house - you don't have to pay sales tax on the purchases, you can get 30% of the cost of the system taken off your income tax bill, if you use equipment made in Washington you get 54¢ per kilowatt hour for all the electricity your system produces until June 2020, and if you should happen to generate more energy than you use PSE will buy the surplus from you... The blog says, "There may not, for a long time to come, be a better time to install photovoltaic equipment on your home," although I suppose that depends on a lot of unknown variables, from the outcome of elections to the cost of Chinese solar panels...

If you happen to be in a relatively high tax bracket, you might also consider investing in the community solar projects that are planning to put solar on the roof of the Hands On Children's' Museum, City Hall and the new Fire Station. In addition to versions of some of the residential incentives, those projects will allow investors to reduce their taxable income for five years by depreciating the system's cost over that period; that's a considerably bigger savings if you'd would have been paying 33% on the income that's not being taxed than if you would have been paying 15%... (I have contact information for somebody working on the Museum project if you're interested in that.)