Julia Hamm has worked with SEPA since before the organization went by that name. About a year after graduating with a B.S. in business management and marketing from Cornell University, Hamm worked for a consulting firm, and as it turned out, the Utility PhotoVoltaic Group (UPVG), the first incarnation of SEPA, was among her employer’s clients. According to Hamm, she took the job because it had an entry-level marketing position; not because she wanted to work in the energy space. “When they told me I was going to be working with the PhotoVoltaic Group, I turned to the guy and said, 'photo what?' I had no experience with energy, but it didn’t take long for me to realize that I really enjoyed the work and had a passion for the industry.”

In the early 2000’s, UPVG changed its name to the Solar Electric Power Association. The new name more accurately suited the organization’s role in piloting utility solar projects across the U.S. Over the span of 15 years, utilities and energy consumers began to recognize the value of solar power in the integration of smart and clean energy onto the electricity grid. Just as SEPA has evolved with the industry, so has its mission. The organization changed its name once again in 2016 – this time to the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Since, SEPA has further solidified the educational nonprofit as a “one-stop-shop for trusted information and solutions to clean energy and grid modernization challenges.”

Today, the organization’s focus is broader, with a vision to achieve a carbon-free energy system by 2050, and a mission geared specifically to the power sector piece of carbon reduction. Hamm describes SEPA as a neutral, trusted source of information. “We spend a lot of time on education and research, encouraging a dialogue between utilities, solution providers and regulators, as opposed to focusing on advocacy and lobbying, which we do not do.”

Bringing together stakeholders with different levels of expertise and a variety of perspectives has positioned SEPA as an invaluable industry resource. The organization’s efforts on developing a Distributed Energy Management Systems (DERMS) requirements document exemplifies how SEPA encourages collaboration among industry leaders, solution providers and stakeholders.

As the expectation grew that more utilities would begin deploying DERMS, SEPA recognized there were no standards or requirements in place to guide utilities. To develop standards and identify requirements, SEPA formed a Grid Management Working Group and convened meetings with utilities to discuss the need for a requirements document. In late 2017, when EET&D spoke with SEPA’s Chief Innovation Officer Sharon Allan in the magazine’s inaugural “Powherful Forces” column, SEPA had formed a utilities-only Grid Management Working Group to get input on the DERMS requirements document. Once that phase of the information-gathering was complete, the organization then brought in solutions providers to get their perspective. As a result, SEPA issued a DERMS requirements document in January of this year.

More recently, SEPA launched its “Renovate” initiative, which is focused on spurring the evolution of state regulatory processes and practices to enable innovation. Hamm says Renovate not only enables innovation, both in generating resources, but also in utility operating practices that will accelerate the movement towards cleaner energy systems. She notes that Renovate has many parallels to the DERMS initiative in that it’s about bringing people with different viewpoints together to discuss issues and jointly come up with solutions. “We have a task force made up of state regulators, utility executives, consumer advocates and technology companies. Each of those five groups has multiple representatives, and then, we have a whole variety of industry partners that we’re bringing together.”

Currently, the task force is looking at common challenges across the country with state regulatory processes, practices and structures and identifying potential solutions to those challenges. “We recognize that every state is different,” says Hamm. “There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, so we’ve identified four common problem statements. For each of those problems, we’re coming up with a suite of potential solutions and promising case studies. When we are finished, each of the states can look at the different options and determine which ones they think could work for them.”

SEPA has also recently introduced its four “Pathways” or core areas of focus for the organization. According to Hamm, the pathways include utility business models, regulatory innovation, grid integration and transportation electrification. “We understand that utilities make up a significant portion of our membership, which is part of what makes us unique, but at the same time, what makes us even more valuable is that we are also bringing together the regulatory community, the solution provider community and other stakeholders to jointly problem-solve.”

Under Hamm’s leadership, SEPA has it eye on the rapid increase of commitments at the corporate and local government levels to clean energy and carbon reduction. “Xcel Energy’s announcement in the fourth quarter of last year to be carbon-free by 2050 really set the bar,” says Hamm. “Since then, we have seen a number of other utilities, both big and small, make similar commitments to the point where we’ve actually created a tool on the SEPA website to publicly track and share the commitments that all the utilities are making.”

Hamm points out that with this push towards clean energy, utilities are feeling increased pressure from the investment community to evaluate carbon reduction in terms of business risk, and to make sure they are planning changes for their business to reduce risk. “Fortunately,” says Hamm, “the decreasing prices of clean energy options are a big help. As these clean resources get less expensive, they become more viable.” Hamm considers the move towards clean energy a massive trend that signifies how utilities are thinking about what their goals should be. “Of the trends driving utilities today, this push towards carbon-free is really gratifying.”

In the nearly 20 years Hamm has worked with SEPA, she has channeled her passion for the industry into a vision that has paved the way for solar power as an alternative energy option that is here to stay. Crediting her collaborative approach towards leadership, Hamm believes all stakeholders must have a say in what the desired outcomes should be. “Promoting that collaboration and connecting people who can help or benefit from working with each other is what excites me about my job because that’s really what SEPA is all about. I love being able to see the big picture of what’s happening across this entire industry. I enjoy having the big picture perspective, being able to see where the trends are, and then helping people translate those.”