How William Heronemus Kickstarted Wind Energy

With a commanding yet kind presence, Captain William Heronemus [left, in hat] inspired his UMass Amherst team to get the job done. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries A half century ago, a scrappy crew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst erected a wind turbine on Orchard Hill, the highest point on campus. It was a frugal production, cobbled together from the rear axle of a Ford truck, a donated generator and microcontroller, a steam pipe, and various handcrafted steel and fiberglass parts, including its 4.5-meter blades.The team of UMass engineering grad students, faculty advisors, and one precocious undergrad built it to prove that wind energy could keep rural homes toasty in New England’s frigid winters, as a way of trimming U.S. oil dependence—a national imperative in the aftermath of the 1973–1974 energy crisis. To illustrate the point, they also assembled a modular home there on Orchard Hill, and outfitted it with heaters that would be powered by the turbine. In 1975 and 1976, a crew from the University of Massachusetts Amherst designed and constructed the 25-kilowatt wind turbine that kick-started the U.S. wind industry. Sandy Butterfield It worked—too well. “We had to open up the doors in the dead of winter. It was just too damn hot,” recalls Michael Edds, who designed the turbine’s electrical system and served as the project’s first resident engineer. Fittingly, they dubbed the turbine the “Wind Furnace.”The turbine maxed out at 25 kilowatts—puny compared to modern machines that generate up to 26 megawatts, but more than most energy experts expected from wind technology in November 1976. Back then, wind power still conjured up images of quaint Dutch mills and creaky prairie water pumpers. Crafty engineers would soon show that wind power could be so much more. And it all began with the brilliant, commanding, and often polarizing UMass professor leading the Wind Furnace project: William Heronemus.A retired U.S. Navy captain, Heronemus had joined the UMass faculty in 1967.

He’d earned Bronze Stars for valor in World War II, designed and built nuclear submarines, and liaised with the British Royal Navy on the Polaris missile. UMass had recruited Heronemus to do ocean engineering, but the energy crisis and his growing misgivings about nuclear power shifted his attention to renewable energy. Heronemus, photographed circa 1973, publicly advocated for the buildout of wind turbines, both onshore and off, at immense scale. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries By 1972, Heronemus was advancing detailed designs to deploy wind turbines at immense scale. That year, at the Marine Technology Society’s annual gathering in Washington, D.C., he presented schemes for building thousands of them across the Great Plains as well as a vast grid of massive floating turbines transecting New England’s continental shelf. Wind power, he contended, could generate nearly a fifth of U.S. electricity needs by the year 2000. Never mind that the technology for such an enormous buildout had yet to be commercialized. Espousing grand schemes made Heronemus a quixotic figure.He also vigorously attacked the commercialization of nuclear power, creating enemies within electric utilities and U.S. government agencies that saw nuclear technology as the future. They didn’t appreciate his claims that a cleaner energy future via wind was ready to be tapped, and that the push for nuclear power and its radiological risks was unnecessary. As author and energy analyst Peter Asmus put it in his 2000 book, Reaping the Wind: “William Heronemus was a dangerous man suggesting an audacious departure from the status quo.” The UMass Amherst wind turbine generated most of the energy to heat a modular home through the cold, windy winters on Orchard Hill. Solar thermal panels provided some heat during windless periods. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst LibrariesWhat happened on Orchard Hill in 1976 marked Heronemus’s turn from provocateur to changemaker. The success of the experimental turbine set off waves of technological and industrial developments that forever changed the energy landscape.

Within a few years, the students he trained and the entrepreneurs he inspired were building the world’s first modern wind farms and leading the Great California Wind Rush—the market that turned wind craft into an industry that’s still growing fast half a century later.Globally, annual wind generation more than tripled between 2015 and 2025, according to data from Ember Energy, a think tank based in London. It will best nuclear’s global output by the end of this year, Ember predicts. And it all started with Heronemus, says Robert Thresher, longtime former director of wind research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. (a U.S. Department of Energy lab rebranded late last year as the National Laboratory of the Rockies). “In my mind he was the father of the people that went out and really made the industry what it is today,” he says.William Heronemus and the History of Wind PowerI got to know Captain Heronemus posthumously, interviewing his contemporaries and sifting through boxes delivered to the UMass Amherst archival research center’s 25th-floor reading room. During three visits there since 2023, I have discovered clues to his life, thinking, and research process amid the writings where he pitched his big ideas to the world. His papers include proposals to governments, utilities, and deep-pocketed philanthropists and investors, including Jane Fonda and Goldman-Sachs. Papers reveal the internationalism and commitment to service that took Heronemus on renewable-energy consulting trips to Pakistan, Cuba, Côte d’Ivoire, and beyond. Records show meetings with corporate powerhouses like Boeing and Grumman Aerospace and calls on politicians, including the senator and presidential hopeful Ted Kennedy. Postcards from former students exude gratitude. Heronemus sits with a mock-up of a multirotor turbine in his cramped office in Marston Hall, UMass Amherst’s main engineering building. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries I learned that Heronemus turned his attention from ocean engineering to energy a few years after arriving at UMass, when he saw the growing string of nuclear power plants going up along the Connecticut River, which flows past Amherst en route to Long Island Sound.

The U.S. government had picked nuclear power as an antidote to the 1970s oil crises, and Northeast utilities had jumped in big. But Heronemus and other UMass engineers worried that the riverside reactors’ waste heat would threaten the river’s ecosystem and bounty.The advent of cooling towers to blow off heat into the air addressed the thermal pollution concern but created another: water depletion. (Nuclear plants consume about 60 million gallons of water per day, per reactor, on average.) And Heronemus perceived other nuclear power liabilities, stemming from his experience with nuclear propulsion on Navy ships. As a design engineer and head of construction and repair for a shipyard, he valued the military’s zero-accident standard for reactors but also knew the high cost of adhering to it. He argued that building expanded versions of the Navy’s pressurized water reactors to power cities and factories couldn’t be both safe and economical. In 1971, Heronemus designed an offshore turbine with three rotors, but the first big multirotor prototype wouldn’t be built for another four decades. Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries He predicted—accurately, as it turned out—that costs would rise sharply as the nuclear industry addressed safety and environmental concerns. “Each plant costs more than its predecessor. The shipyards involved with nuclear reactors came to that conclusion years ago,” he wrote in a 1973 research proposal. He also argued that the risks inherent in nuclear reactors and their radioactive waste were unnecessary given Earth’s abundant solar and wind energy resources. He broadcast those views wherever and whenever he could: before congressional committees, at U.S. Atomic Energy Commission hearings, at academic conferences, in media interviews, and even at Rotary Club luncheons.At a 1973 licensing hearing for the proposed 820-MW Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, N.Y., for example, Heronemus called affordable nuclear energy a “myth.” He detailed, in its stead, a floating wind power system that could be moored off Long Island and sized to deliver more than four times as much electricity as the Shoreham plant. Each of the 640 floating platforms would carry six rotors and crank out up to 12 MW, some of which would power electrolyzers to generate hydrogen.

The hydrogen would be fed to power plants or fuel cells to produce electricity when the wind wasn’t blowing. This seemingly futuristic idea drew on his Navy experience with water-splitting electrolyzers, which supplied the oxygen that enabled subs to remain submerged for months at a time, and NASA’s use of hydrogen fuel cells to power the Apollo missions.More than five decades later, his vision for offshore wind power is big business. Floating platforms are now widely accepted as the future of offshore wind, as necessity pushes the industry to build in deeper waters. Testing began on the first floating electrolysis platforms in 2023, and multirotor turbine prototypes are in development in China, Norway and Scotland.The UMass Amherst Wind Turbine LegacyPhotos in the UMass archives invariably capture Heronemus in jacket and tie, usually standing bolt straight. That commanding affect, plus his World War II veteran pedigree, Cold War engineering credentials, and his informed, pugnacious attacks made him a hard target for his adversaries in the nuclear establishment. He certainly wasn’t your typical antinuclear activist. Wielding his Cold War engineering credentials and often dressed in a suit and tie, Heronemus fought hard against nuclear energy, arguing that wind was a far safer and cost-competitive resource.Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center/UMass Amherst Libraries But brutal candor in public settings probably won him as many enemies as friends. Consider his presentation at the IEEE Power and Energy Society’s 1974 winter meeting, where Heronemus suggested scrapping the utilities’ then nuclear-focused research arm, the Electric Power Research Institute. That stance no doubt created discomfort for the engineers in attendance who were involved in EPRI projects, or who aspired to be.It’s hard to say whether Heronemus’s campaign slowed nuclear development. The industry was already struggling with cost overruns when, in 1979, a reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania partially melted down and slammed the brakes on further expansion.What is certain is that Heronemus spurred investment in wind power. When he started talking up wind in the early ’70s, even fellow travelers in the fledgling renewable energy movement were writing it off.