Rick Ham Greens Cities with Induction Lighting

Rick Ham is brightening the future of his family’s US Lighting Tech (USLT) by promoting 100,000-hour-rated induction lights that save eco-conscious U.S. cities 60 percent in energy costs and 80 percent in maintenance costs.

Like fluorescent lights USLT’s induction lights use phosphor-coated tubes filled with mercury vapor that produce UV light when excited by electricity. In turn the UV light excites the phosphor, causing it to fluoresce with visible light. The problem is that fluorescent lights use electrodes to conduct electricity directly into the gases. Those electrodes degrade over time and burn out in no more than 20,000 hours.

USLT’s induction lights dispense with electrodes by using rapidly shifting magnetic fields to induce electricity through the mercury vapor, extending the lights’ useful life by a factor of five. The savings resulting from less frequent replacement and lower energy use more than offsets the higher initial cost of the induction lights.

That’s why clients like the state of New Jersey, Oregon Department of Transportation, the City of Carlsbad, California and others are adopting USLT streetlamps by the tens of thousands. Barely six years after its founding in 2005 USLT already enjoys sales of $30 million a year.

For Ham, 39, the first big break came in 2008 when New Jersey’s energy utility PSE&G ordered 110,000 of the firm’s Jersey Series Cobra Head lamps to kick off the nation’s largest green street lighting initiative. It also happened to be the world’s single biggest induction installation. That project established USLT as the leader in induction lighting and helped it land a long list of other projects, mostly from cities and various transportation and correctional departments around the country.

“Initially, USLT’s biggest challenge was having the access to the high level decision makers — especially on the municipal level – to enable them to clearly understand the merits of the induction format,” says Ham. “The company has been able to overcome this challenge by educating key influencers – one prospect at a time. And, now, the company’s primary challenge is to keep other companies with so-called copy cat products from duplicating its product technology in an inferior way that only undermines the integrity of the entire induction category.”

Another advantage USLT has enjoyed in securing public contracts is its U.S.-based production facility located in Irvine. In September of 2010 USLT overcame a big hurdle to selling to local governments funded by U.S. Department of Energy by successfully passing an audit by the DOE as to whether its products qualified for the Buy American provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

His success in building USLT into a leader in the lighting business won Rick Ham a nomination for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award for Orange County in June 2011.

Rick Ham had an early head start in the lighting business. While earning his BS in business at USC he began working as the marketing director at US Energy Technologies (USET), the company founded in 1992 by his parents Byung-Il and Insook (Sue) Ham. Before Rick Ham left to earn his MBA at Cornell, USET had become one of Orange County’s top 50 private companies. USLT was founded in 2005 as a subsidiary of USET. Ham left his post as a marketing manager in Hewlett Packard’s consumer business in 2006 to become president and CEO of USLT.

Ham was born in Seoul, Korea in February of 1972. Less than a year later he came to the U.S. with his parents in November of 1972. His younger brother Alex is the Chief Operating Officer of USET.