Julia Hamm


Growth in California’s solar market will be driven by demand for wholesale distributed generation, as utilities shift away from central power stations to rooftop installations of one megawatt or less, said the executive director of a leading clean power consultancy.

Craig Lewis from the Clean Coalition told the PHOTON Solar Electric Utility Conference in San Francisco that he had been advising the California governor on his 20 GW of additional renewables by 2020. Lewis compared installation rates between California and Germany: in 2011 Germans installed an additional 7.5 GW and while California added around 40 0MW. Last year, the US had an installed solar capacity of 3 GW, versus 18 GW in Germany. Keep reading →


Californian utilities are showing signs of softening their resistance to policy that would have accelerated the deployment of cost-effective solar in the state, the chief of a leading trade body in the US said last week.

Julia Hamm, president and CEO of the Solar Electric Power Association, told the PHOTON Solar Electric Utility Conference in San Francisco last week: “In 2007/2008, feed in tariff conversations really started to pick up here in the US. There was significant resistance from utilities toward the concept of the feed in tariff. My own personal perspective is the idea of a utility mandated to buy power at a price that they can’t control is not appealing to them. That was the initial opposition.” Keep reading →