The rainy season may be on us, más o menos, but sunshine seems to be the subject of conversation where it counts:

On Friday, the House of Representatives narrowly approved the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which promises, among other things, to make solar and other alternative energy a big part of our country's future.

Just a few days before that, at Sandia National Laboratory, scientists trotted out prototypes of solar dishes looking like gigantic versions of satellite-TV antennas. Mirrors on the dishes focus the sun's power on specially built electricity generators. Work is far enough along on these dishes that our state's utilities might be buying power generated by them sometime next year.

The Sandia Lab project has the advantage of not needing water as part of the generating process. Some kinds of solar generators had depended on water, making them suspect in the desert Southwest.

Out on the plains between Springer and Cimarron, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the Colorado-based cooperative serving customers in New Mexico as well, hopes that by August of 2010 it'll be generating some of what soon could be a photovoltaic supply for 9,000 homes. Tri-State's project features 2- by 4-foot panels flexible enough to withstand the area's hailstorms. It involves thin-film technology, which has been around for several years, and which is undergoing constant improvements.

Then yesterday came another commitment to solar energy: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar joined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Las Vegas to announce fast-track plans for solar generating plants in six Western states: New Mexico, claro, along with Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado and Utah.

Salazar said his department is setting aside
1,000 square miles of Bureau of Land Management property, much of it yet to be pinned down on a map, as solar farms — probably occupying a couple of dozen tracts. They'll be designated as Solar Energy Study Areas, which might mean many more years of research before they amount to major supplies of reliable electricity.

Yet with some solar collectors close to commercial operation, these study areas could produce coming generations of solar power while pioneering efforts in mirror-focusing and solar panels are plugged into a national power grid too long dependent on coal and hydrocarbons.

So all this is far from the realm of science fiction; some reputable firms are putting plenty of capital into alternative energy. And in the meantime, wind generators, once scoffed at by the get-a-horse establishment, are busily spinning electricity out on the llanos of New Mexico — and, ironically, above the sagebrush of Wyoming not far from where Big Coal is gouging away at the earth.

And we're still seeing too little effort to bring generation closer to homes and factories. The days of long-lines transmission should be fading.

The shift from carbon-burning electricity still could take may years. But if the Senate turns out to be as serious as the House is about clean energy, and at least somewhat resistant to the forces of finite resources, the transition could begin in earnest.