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, argues the executive director of a leading clean-power consultancy.
Speaking to the PHOTON Solar Electric Utility Conference in San Francisco, Craig Lewis from the Clean Coalition compared installation rates in California and Germany. In 2011, Germans installed an additional 7.5 GW while California added around 400 MW.
That brought the installed U.S. solar capacity to 3 GW, versus 18 GW in Germany.
One reason Germany leads, Lewis said, is a focus on distributed generation.
