A half century in the past, a scrappy crew on the College of Massachusetts Amherst erected a wind turbine on Orchard Hill, the very best level on campus. It was a frugal manufacturing, cobbled collectively from the rear axle of a Ford truck, a donated generator and microcontroller, a steam pipe, and varied handcrafted metal and fiberglass components, together with its 4.5-meter blades.
The group of UMass engineering grad college students, college advisors, and one precocious undergrad constructed it to show that wind power might maintain rural houses toasty in New England’s frigid winters, as a manner of trimming U.S. oil dependence—a nationwide crucial within the aftermath of the 1973–1974 power disaster. For instance the purpose, in addition they assembled a modular dwelling there on Orchard Hill, and outfitted it with heaters that may be powered by the turbine.
In 1975 and 1976, a crew from the College of Massachusetts Amherst designed and constructed the 25-kilowatt wind turbine that kick-started the U.S. wind trade. Sandy Butterfield
It labored—too nicely. “We needed to open up the doorways within the lifeless of winter. It was simply too rattling scorching,” remembers Michael Edds, who designed the turbine’s electrical system and served because the undertaking’s first resident engineer. Fittingly, they dubbed the turbine the “Wind Furnace.”
The turbine maxed out at 25 kilowatts—puny in comparison with trendy machines that generate as much as 26 megawatts, however greater than most power consultants anticipated from wind expertise in November 1976. Again then, wind energy nonetheless conjured up photos of quaint Dutch mills and creaky prairie water pumpers. Artful engineers would quickly present that wind energy might be a lot extra. And all of it started with the good, commanding, and sometimes polarizing UMass professor main the Wind Furnace undertaking: William Heronemus.
A retired U.S. Navy captain, Heronemus had joined the UMass college in 1967. He’d earned Bronze Stars for valor in World Struggle II, designed and constructed nuclear submarines, and liaised with the British Royal Navy on the Polaris missile. UMass had recruited Heronemus to do ocean engineering, however the power disaster and his rising misgivings about nuclear energy shifted his consideration to renewable power.
Heronemus, photographed circa 1973, publicly advocated for the buildout of wind generators, each onshore and off, at immense scale. Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
By 1972, Heronemus was advancing detailed designs to deploy wind generators at immense scale. That yr, on the Marine Know-how Society’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., he introduced schemes for constructing hundreds of them throughout the Nice Plains in addition to an unlimited grid of huge floating generators transecting New England’s continental shelf. Wind energy, he contended, might generate almost a fifth of U.S. electrical energy wants by the yr 2000. By no means thoughts that the expertise for such an infinite buildout had but to be commercialized. Espousing grand schemes made Heronemus a quixotic determine.
He additionally vigorously attacked the commercialization of nuclear energy, creating enemies inside electrical utilities and U.S. authorities companies that noticed nuclear expertise as the long run. They didn’t respect his claims {that a} cleaner power future by way of wind was able to be tapped, and that the push for nuclear energy and its radiological dangers was pointless. As creator and power analyst Peter Asmus put it in his 2000 ebook, Reaping the Wind: “William Heronemus was a harmful man suggesting an audacious departure from the established order.”
The UMass Amherst wind turbine generated a lot of the power to warmth a modular dwelling by way of the chilly, windy winters on Orchard Hill. Photo voltaic thermal panels offered some warmth throughout windless intervals. Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
What occurred on Orchard Hill in 1976 marked Heronemus’s flip from provocateur to changemaker. The success of the experimental turbine set off waves of technological and industrial developments that without end modified the power panorama. Inside a couple of years, the scholars he educated and the entrepreneurs he impressed have been constructing the world’s first trendy wind farms and main the Nice California Wind Rush—the market that turned wind craft into an trade that’s nonetheless rising quick half a century later.
Globally, annual wind era greater than tripled between 2015 and 2025, based on knowledge from Ember Energy, a assume tank primarily based in London. It’ll greatest nuclear’s world output by the top of this yr, Ember predicts. And it began with Heronemus, says Robert Thresher, longtime former director of wind analysis on the Nationwide Renewable Vitality Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. (a U.S. Division of Vitality lab rebranded late final yr because the National Laboratory of the Rockies). “In my thoughts he was the daddy of the those that went out and actually made the trade what it’s right now,” he says.
William Heronemus and the Historical past of Wind Energy
I acquired to know Captain Heronemus posthumously, interviewing his contemporaries and sifting by way of containers delivered to the UMass Amherst archival analysis middle’s Twenty fifth-floor studying room. Throughout three visits there since 2023, I’ve found clues to his life, pondering, and analysis course of amid the writings the place he pitched his large concepts to the world. His papers embrace proposals to governments, utilities, and deep-pocketed philanthropists and buyers, together with Jane Fonda and Goldman-Sachs. Papers reveal the internationalism and dedication to service that took Heronemus on renewable-energy consulting journeys to Pakistan, Cuba, Côte d’Ivoire, and past. Information present conferences with company powerhouses like Boeing and Grumman Aerospace and calls on politicians, together with the senator and presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy. Postcards from former college students exude gratitude.
Heronemus sits with a mock-up of a multirotor turbine in his cramped workplace in Marston Corridor, UMass Amherst’s primary engineering constructing. Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
I realized that Heronemus turned his consideration from ocean engineering to power a couple of years after arriving at UMass, when he noticed the rising string of nuclear energy vegetation going up alongside the Connecticut River, which flows previous Amherst en path to Lengthy Island Sound. The U.S. authorities had picked nuclear energy as an antidote to the Nineteen Seventies oil crises, and Northeast utilities had jumped in large. However Heronemus and different UMass engineers frightened that the riverside reactors’ waste warmth would threaten the river’s ecosystem and bounty.
The arrival of cooling towers to blow off warmth into the air addressed the thermal air pollution concern however created one other: water depletion. (Nuclear vegetation eat about 60 million gallons of water per day, per reactor, on common.) And Heronemus perceived different nuclear energy liabilities, stemming from his expertise with nuclear propulsion on Navy ships. As a design engineer and head of development and restore for a shipyard, he valued the navy’s zero-accident commonplace for reactors but additionally knew the excessive price of adhering to it. He argued that constructing expanded variations of the Navy’s pressurized water reactors to energy cities and factories couldn’t be each protected and economical.
In 1971, Heronemus designed an offshore turbine with three rotors, however the first large multirotor prototype wouldn’t be constructed for an additional 4 many years. Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
He predicted—precisely, because it turned out—that prices would rise sharply because the nuclear trade addressed security and environmental issues. “Every plant prices greater than its predecessor. The shipyards concerned with nuclear reactors got here to that conclusion years in the past,” he wrote in a 1973 analysis proposal. He additionally argued that the dangers inherent in nuclear reactors and their radioactive waste have been pointless given Earth’s considerable photo voltaic and wind power assets. He broadcast these views wherever and every time he might: earlier than congressional committees, at U.S. Atomic Vitality Fee hearings, at educational conferences, in media interviews, and even at Rotary Membership luncheons.
At a 1973 licensing listening to for the proposed 820-MW Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Lengthy Island, N.Y., for instance, Heronemus known as inexpensive nuclear power a “fable.” He detailed, in its stead, a floating wind energy system that might be moored off Lengthy Island and sized to ship greater than 4 occasions as a lot electrical energy because the Shoreham plant. Every of the 640 floating platforms would carry six rotors and crank out as much as 12 MW, a few of which might energy electrolyzers to generate hydrogen. The hydrogen can be fed to energy vegetation or gas cells to supply electrical energy when the wind wasn’t blowing. This seemingly futuristic thought drew on his Navy expertise with water-splitting electrolyzers, which equipped the oxygen that enabled subs to stay submerged for months at a time, and NASA’s use of hydrogen fuel cells to energy the Apollo missions.
Greater than 5 many years later, his imaginative and prescient for offshore wind power is large enterprise. Floating platforms are actually extensively accepted as the way forward for offshore wind, as necessity pushes the industry to build in deeper waters. Testing started on the first floating electrolysis platforms in 2023, and multirotor turbine prototypes are in improvement in China, Norway and Scotland.
The UMass Amherst Wind Turbine Legacy
Pictures within the UMass archives invariably seize Heronemus in jacket and tie, normally standing bolt straight. That commanding have an effect on, plus his World Struggle II veteran pedigree, Chilly Struggle engineering credentials, and his knowledgeable, pugnacious assaults made him a tough goal for his adversaries within the nuclear institution. He actually wasn’t your typical antinuclear activist.
Wielding his Chilly Struggle engineering credentials and sometimes wearing a swimsuit and tie, Heronemus fought arduous towards nuclear power, arguing that wind was a far safer and cost-competitive useful resource.Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
However brutal candor in public settings in all probability gained him as many enemies as associates. Take into account his presentation on the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s 1974 winter assembly, the place Heronemus steered scrapping the utilities’ then nuclear-focused analysis arm, the Electric Power Research Institute. That stance little doubt created discomfort for the engineers in attendance who have been concerned in EPRI initiatives, or who aspired to be.
It’s arduous to say whether or not Heronemus’s marketing campaign slowed nuclear improvement. The trade was already combating price overruns when, in 1979, a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down and slammed the brakes on additional growth.
What is for certain is that Heronemus spurred funding in wind energy. When he began speaking up wind within the early ’70s, even fellow vacationers within the fledgling renewable power motion have been writing it off. As future White Home science advisor John Holdren opined in a 1971 Sierra Club ebook: “There are few locations on the planet the place the wind is robust sufficient and regular sufficient to make harnessing it for the large-scale manufacturing of energy in any respect attention-grabbing.”
Heronemus dreamed up networks of wind generators over and alongside highways after driving down the Backyard State Parkway to a convention in Cape Could, New Jersey. Ellen Heronemus
Heronemus countered the naysayers by rapidly forging professional consensus round wind energy’s immense potential, taking part in a key position as the only real wind professional on a 1972 federal panel on renewable energy. That joint Nationwide Science Basis–NASA panel concluded that, in reality, wind might meet as much as 19 % of projected U.S. energy demand by the yr 2000.
Congress listened, type of. After most Persian Gulf states restricted oil shipments to the US in 1973, congressional appropriators devoted US $1.8 million to wind-power analysis and improvement for 1974—up from zero—and by 1976 it had bumped that to $22 million. (For comparability, Congress gave nuclear energy $714 million in 1976.)
Heronemus’s imaginative and prescient for an enormous freeway wind-power scheme was impressed partially by the wind-power advocate Percy Thomas, who within the Nineteen Forties and Nineteen Fifties “talked rather a lot about how contemporary New Jersey winds are,” he informed the New York Instances in 1974. “I acquired to excited about what Thomas had stated and the way wind power might be captured there.” Ellen Heronemus
The majority of the funding for wind energy flowed to large aerospace companies and to NASA, financing an finally fruitless try and leap straight to megawatt-scale wind generators. UMass struggled to seize a slice of the leftovers to pursue Heronemus’s offshore wind system. Professors and college students who labored with Heronemus informed me they felt they’d been blackballed as payback for his activism and antagonism.
UMass lastly caught a funding break when Heronemus dialed again his ambitions and proposed the 25-kW unit for Orchard Hill. A $130,000 federal grant landed in early 1975, and $150,000 extra the next yr. It was a “trivial” sum, based on group member Sandy Butterfield, who would later turn out to be chief engineer for wind-turbine testing at NREL. “They gave us simply sufficient to fail,” says Butterfield.
A crane erects the “Wind Furnace” in November 1976. Sandy Butterfield
However the undertaking triumphed, leading to Wind Furnace 1, or WF-1 (pronounced “woof one”). The younger engineers behind it credit score their success to the boldness, sense of mission, and construction that Heronemus gave them. The self-described “hippies” known as Heronemus “the Captain” out of each affection and respect.
As group member Edds places it: “What confirmed in his demeanor and his actions was self-discipline, and it type of rubbed off on us. We didn’t all the time costume just like the Captain, however we knew we needed to be disciplined, to be ready, and simply do the job.”
From Helicopter Rotor to Wind Turbine
Workforce WF-1 acquired a fast begin, due to earlier, privately financed work by a few doctoral college students, together with Forrest “Woody” Stoddard. Stoddard had been designing helicopter rotors for the U.S. Air Pressure when Heronemus invited him to come back work on wind energy in 1972. Stoddard set about adapting helicopter-rotor idea to the intently associated wind rotors, and his aerodynamics modeling proved important to the engineering of the whole machine.
Woody Stoddard [far right, in hat] designed the fiberglass blades. The group assembled the blades in a campus store, and when it was time to squeegee epoxy from the blades, it was all palms on deck. Robert S. Cox Particular Collections and College Archives Analysis Heart/UMass Amherst Libraries
As WF-1’s de facto chief designer, Stoddard doubtless supported the group’s early option to mimic a helicopter’s means to “pitch” its blades. To fly ahead, a helicopter constantly adjusts the elevate created by every blade, turning the airfoil on its lengthy axis to cut back elevate because it swings previous the entrance of the plane. Doing so tilts the nostril down and strikes the car ahead. In WF-1’s case, blades pitched to control torque, serving to get the rotor spinning in low winds after which easing off to guard the machine in dangerously excessive winds.
Repurposing a truck axle to mechanically couple WF-1’s rotor and generator was one in every of a number of design parts borrowed from engineers at McGill University in Montreal. Manufacturing of WF-1’s fiberglass blades acquired began at UMass in 1974 underneath the course of doctoral pupil Ted Van Dusen. A aggressive rower, he had a aspect hustle making ultralight composite boats—a commerce that had stalled his doctoral work at MIT however was an accelerant for WF-1.
The federal funds in 1975 allowed Heronemus to essentially spin up the undertaking and recruit a squad of scholars to engineer the steadiness of WF-1’s parts. They made good use of the UMass engineering machine store and obtained steering from college, together with mechanical engineering professors Duane Cromack and Jon McGowan. However it was the dozen or so college students who actually cranked out the components.
Most have been grasp’s college students, like Butterfield, who designed the blade-pitching mechanics. Edds, the group’s solely electrical engineer, had come to UMass to study ocean engineering, solely to be diverted into dealing with WF-1’s generator. Louis Manfredi, one other ocean engineering pupil, teamed up with grasp’s pupil Jim Sexton on the nacelle housing the generator and drivetrain. Fred Antoon tailored the truck axle. Brian Kuhn did drawings.
WF-1 contained a mechanism that pitched its blades to control torque in response to wind pace, a function that turned an trade commonplace.Sandy Butterfield
An 18-year-old freshman, Dan Handman, got here aboard and shortly made himself indispensable. When he approached Heronemus to introduce himself, Heronemus handed him three months’ price of anemometer readings punched into recording paper, and informed him to show it into 15-minute averages. Figuring there needed to be a extra environment friendly methodology for analyzing wind speeds, Handman requested round and located a wind-averaging machine from an earlier pupil undertaking. A month or so later, he’d put in it in a cupboard close to Heronemus’s workplace and wired it to an anemometer on Orchard Hill.
Handman’s major position on WF-1 was organising its computerized management system, which tracked wind pace and despatched instructions to Butterfield’s pitch mechanism. The controls additionally tracked the generator’s pace and adjusted the present to its rotor windings, in accordance with calculations by Edds. Tweaking the present ensured that energy demand from the electrical heaters put in within the dwelling under didn’t cease the rotor in weak winds.
Sandy Butterfield, a part of the Nineteen Seventies “UMass Mafia” group that constructed WF-1, turned a wind-power entrepreneur and a high engineer on the Nationwide Renewable Vitality Laboratory in Golden, Colo. Sandy Butterfield
The completed WF-1 actually cranked up the warmth, a few of which was saved by heating water in tanks within the modular home’s basement, to be circulated by way of baseboards in windless intervals. It turned out WF-1 was unusually environment friendly at capturing wind power as a result of its rotor might change pace with the wind, holding the blades near an aerodynamic optimum.
This various rotor pace meant that the frequency of the electrical energy WF-1 produced additionally diversified. Generators linked to energy traces should attempt for the other—a gradual output that synchronizes with the grid’s frequency—primarily 50 or 60 hertz. However it suited the house’s low-tech heating scheme simply wonderful. (Digital converters let right now’s generators have all of it by ingesting a variable wave and outputting a brand new wave that’s synced to the grid.)
The Nice California Wind Rush
In 1977, with WF-1’s success in hand, Heronemus projected that 3 million houses just like the one on Orchard Hill might quickly slash U.S. heating oil demand by 90 million barrels a yr. That by no means occurred, however an trade was born, beginning with a Burlington, Mass. startup known as US Windpower—the primary “credible” U.S. turbine producer, based on Thresher, who’s now an emeritus researcher on the Nationwide Laboratory of the Rockies.
Belgian-made WindMaster generators erected at Altamont Go signaled the approaching of the California wind rush. UMass group member Woody Stoddard carried out engineering analyses of many early designs deployed there.Bettman/Getty Pictures
Boston-area entrepreneurs Russell Wolfe and Stanley Charren launched US Windpower with Stoddard and Van Dusen after visiting Heronemus in 1974 and liking what they heard. They tailored WF-1’s design to make it appropriate for grid-connected operation, constructing and breaking prototypes earlier than erecting the world’s first grid-connected wind farm in 1980—20 turbines on a mountain in New Hampshire. California’s water authority positioned an order for 100 MW of wind energy, and in 1981 US Windpower started installing hundreds of turbines in Altamont Pass, east of San Francisco.
As extra companies jumped to California, drawn by state authorities incentives, WF-1’s creators and the subsequent cohort of UMass grads assumed vital roles within the nascent market. Seven joined Vitality Sciences, a startup cofounded by Butterfield. Extra joined U.S. Windpower. Stoddard left that firm to begin a consulting agency and ended up advising a few of Denmark’s trendy wind pioneers, which quickly expanded due to the California market. These early Danish companies made comparatively easy, sturdy machines that subsequently scaled up and dominated globally for a number of many years — till China embraced wind energy.
The California wind energy increase peaked in 1986, after which power costs collapsed and incentives pale. Most producers have been bankrupted by tools failures and monetary challenges, making the Nineteen Nineties a tricky time for wind energy’s pioneers. Many UMass wind engineers, like Butterfield, joined Thresher’s operation at NREL, culling every part they might from the California expertise.
“A complete era of U.S. wind engineers acquired their graduate coaching, at the very least partially, utilizing the Wind Furnace.”—Harold Wallace
There, Heronemus’s protégés turned referred to as the “UMass Mafia.” Thresher says it attests to the crew’s impression: “There have been others. However that UMass Mafia have been actually leaders within the area. I believe that’s the heritage we acquired from Invoice Heronemus. These folks have been so impactful and the schooling they acquired [with Heronemus] was the important thing.” What Heronemus started on the college turned the UMass Wind Energy Center, which has awarded over 300 graduate levels.
WF-1 now rests within the Smithsonian Institution’s collections in Washington, D.C. It earned its place there, as Smithsonian’s solely trendy wind turbine, as a result of it represents wind power’s revival, based on Harold Wallace, Smithsonian’s curator for electrical energy collections. “A complete era of U.S. wind engineers acquired their graduate coaching, at the very least partially, utilizing the Wind Furnace,” he says.
Heronemus didn’t get to witness the manufacturing of the huge offshore machines that he foresaw. He misplaced his lengthy combat with most cancers in November 2002, on the age of 82, whilst former college students and relations have been racing to patent his multirotor and floating turbine designs.
Had he lived longer, the Captain would nearly actually have railed towards present U.S. power coverage. The U.S. authorities has by no means backed wind energy as generously as he’d hoped. Wind equipped 10 % of U.S. era final yr—that’s half the share in Europe—with offshore generators offering solely a tiny sliver. Federal assist for wind energy has been in a stop-go cycle since Ronald Reagan’s administration, and it’s hit a low once more underneath President Donald Trump, who has vowed to cease wind energy chilly. As Trump boasted to oil executives in January: “We have now not authorized one windmill since I’ve been in workplace, and we’re going to maintain it that manner.”
Underneath Trump, stop-work orders have disrupted offshore initiatives from Massachusetts to Virginia, contributing to a virtually $600 million loss in 2025 for GE Vernova’s wind business. GE Vernova is the one main wind turbine producer remaining in the US, and it too will be traced back to Heronemus via a US Windpower patent.
In stark distinction, European and Asian international locations have been going large on offshore wind and are actually growing floating wind farms to push into deeper waters. China is perhaps the one to lastly conjure up Heronemus’s favored wind design: floating platforms bearing huge multirotor machines. In 2024, Zhongshan-based turbine maker Ming Yang Smart Energy Group deployed a two-rotor offshore prototype. The corporate says its next iteration will generate a whopping 50 MW—a twin-headed beast that may be the world’s strongest wind machine.
That shall be a bittersweet second for the U.S. wind trade and Captain William Heronemus’s UMass Mafia, for whom such huge machines are a dream come true. Joanne Carroll, a retired member of the UMass Mafia, says she remembers the very second, her freshman yr, when Heronemus’s dream turned hers. Whereas he was lecturing in Introduction to Engineering concerning the hidden prices of coal-fired energy, Heronemus walked to the window and stated: “‘However on the market there’s wind, and you may harvest that power,’” Carroll recalled. “And I bear in mind pondering: That’s what I wish to do with my life.”
The creator want to give particular due to UMass professor emeritus James Manwell for his help with this story.
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