While the fossil fuel industry continues to wreak havoc over the American landscape in pursuit of coal, oil, and natural gas, U.S. utilities have started to make a collective shift toward safer and more secure sources of energy. Last spring, a utilities industry research group partnered up with the new Solar Technology Acceleration Center to push solar energy development forward. This week, the Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) sent a group of top utility executives on a solar tour of Japan in order to learn more about integrating solar energy into grids and communities.
You can get a blow-by-blow account of the solar tour by following @JuliaHamm on Twitter, so let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on SEPA, which is a non-profit that works to promote solar energy to the utility industry. Naturally its board includes solar industry companies such as Kyocera, but it is also top heavy with utility industry executives. It provides an interesting snapshot of how far utilities have come, and how far they have to go.