Quoted from Reality_Studio:
Yup you lease them, we went with Sunrun around 8 years or so ago. 0$ down, 0$ charge, all maintenance covered free for the entire lease, guaranteed electric monthly production and your electric bill instantly goes down saving you money on day one. Combine that with an electric car and between the gas and electric bill the savings are *huge*. Because they handle all maintenance free forever they are truly worry free, unlike if you buy them. We don't get overage because we use a lot of electric (two electric cars, I work from home so a/c runs all day, lots of tech gear, etc), but we went from our last big bill being around $620 in one month back 8 years ago to around a peak max of $320 today. The panels alone literally have saved us many thousands of dollars, and gas savings has been in the thousands as well.
If you have electric over production then get a Tesla powerwall, that will save your overage and also power your home if the power goes out, it costs about the price of a pin but you get a tax credit for it. Side bonus, they are a local company and I always try and support local. There's lots of California incentives like this, we take advantage of all of them, has saved us a small fortune.
Seriously, look into all this! That's what I mean when I say ignore what other people say and do your own research as to what your location offers. So while others just keep repeating "California bad" we in turn are both very much data and numbers people so we look at what's available, crunch some numbers and sign up if it saves us money.
EDIT: Forgot to comment on taxes, here's a link for you: https://www.kiplinger.com/slideshow/taxes/T006-S001-10-least-tax-friendly-states-in-the-u-s-2019/index.html
Wow you love to attack me and be obtuse in the process. Do you just like drama or what? They are there in that picture because, get this, they are fire fighters and that is their job, just like policemen get near the bad guys. My "walk away" comment is unbelievably simple to understand, I'm assuming you actually do get it but are being purposely silly just because you seem to love to attack me. But I'll spell it out for you. A fire starts what do you do? Do you sit there and get burned, or do you leave your home and drive away? That's what I mean, it's a natural disaster that is easy to avoid. Counter that to tornado's which can strike randomly anywhere even over your head. Have you ever been in one? I have. There is no escape for those unless you are lucky to be in a concrete garage, which is where we were when some struck when we lived in Texas. Get it now? Likewise if you look at the data just living in winter is more dangerous as all natural disasters. Been there and done that too.
To the fires, yeah they suck but understand the media is in the business of making everything look as bad as possible. There's a fire burning right now near our house some miles away but if you go outside you'd never know it. However if you watch it on tv they make it look like the apocalypse because that keeps people watching and keeps ad revenue flowing. It's no different when we lived in Seattle years ago and they had a 7.8 earthquake. We'd go outside and you'd never know anything happened, but on tv they successfully made it look like armageddon. I can't tell you how many times I've had family and friends call from back in Canada asking if we are ok because tv made stuff look so bad, only for me to tell them that we didn't even notice.
There is tons of wilderness here which is just vulnerable to being burned so yeah if you build your house in the middle of wilderness it will have a chance of being burned. For most people this isn't the case, you may get smoke sometimes but even that is relatively rare. We've had to deal with smoke maybe 3 times in 14 years that we've been here.