With so much talk about distributors of electrical supplies now getting into renewables, it's easy to overlook the pioneers that have been in wind or solar from the beginning. Take WECS Electric Supply Inc., North Palm Springs, Calif., which was probably the first electrical distributor to develop a niche serving wind farms. Electrical Wholesaling profiled the company in a cover story for its July 2001 issue and visited with the company again for a feature story last year. The company recently expanded into the photovoltaics market.
It looks like Bruce Hammett, company president, has a little luck going for him, too, as you can see in this photo of a rainbow. We hope he made a wish! Said Bruce in an e-mail to EW's editors, “Thought you would enjoy this picture from the WECS Rooftop. This day brought rain to Palm Springs, along with high winds and a rainbow. In the foreground is our 11.5kW house power PV system, in the background the many wind turbines, and a “peaker-plant.” The rainbow begins at a substation out of sight to the left, to the Mitsubishi 1MW wind turbines feeding it on the right, showing I suppose the value of all this energy contained in the Palm Springs Alternatives zone.
“WECS has been selling PV systems for about six months now. Our residential/commercial segment is flying off the shelves, and our large projects segment is very promising, having bid some 200 mW to various developers in the past few months. The wind energy developers in the United States and Canada have made utility-scale PV part of the future development portfolio, and WECS has gone right along.”