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the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Northern Power
Systems (in VT), and at Second Wind (in Somerville, MA).
24.3
Another Path to Renewable Energy
My own path to renewable energy was a diferent one than Professor
Heronemus, but the paths both led to UMass. I was born in New
Bedford, MA, once the home port of the American whaling industry.
When I was still quite young my parents moved to Ohio, where
my father became the superintendent of a reform school for
juvenile delinquents. I lived on the grounds of that school until I
was 18. The boys at the school were all from Cleveland. Nearly all of
them came from poor families that had migrated to northern Ohio
to seek work in its once large industrial sector. The contrast
between the reform school and the surrounding town was always
inescapable.
Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s included a
mélange
of activities from the mundane to the eye-opening: wilderness
training with the Boy Scouts; a fascination with math, science,
languages and history; long canoe trips on the lakes and rivers of
Ontario and Maine; a road trip to Alaska, two weeks in Germany;
a year as an exchange student in an English boarding school; a
two-month hitch-hiking adventure from London to Istanbul, and
a return to the United States by ship to enter Amherst College just
as the Vietnam War was escalating. My college experience (which
coincidentally was in the same town as UMass) and its aftermath
were no less eventful and by the mid 1970s I was pondering
what to do next.
The emerging issues of international realignment, nuclear
power, environmental destruction and oil embargoes all led me in
the same direction: a new vision was needed: equitable, inter-
national, rational, and sustainable (i.e., based on solar energy). It
was at that point that I met Professor Heronemus, and it became
apparent that one way to help realise that vision was for me to
begin studying engineering. As a result, I joined the Department
of Mechanical Engineering at UMass as a graduate student in 1976
and studied there until I completed my Ph.D. in 1981.
During these years wind energy in the United Stated went
through a succession of booms and busts, depending on the
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