SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Praise William Heronemus For Today's Wind Energy

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Let us praise William Heronemus.

Mr. Heronemus was a pioneer in wind energy. And he was the first person, in a study done for Suffolk County government back in 1975, to propose the harvesting of great amounts of power from wind energy for Long Island. “Windpower alone, but preferably wind power carefully joined to solar collector systems…could free the entire region from all of the problems associated with proliferation of fossil or nuclear central power plants, and would create thousands of employment opportunities,” wrote Dr. Heronemus for the county.

The study, a comprehensive analysis of existing and future Long Island energy use, was done by Dubin-Mindell Bloome Associates, and Dr. Heronemus played a major part.

This was decades before Deepwater Wind established the first offshore wind farm in the United States, two years ago now, east of Long Island off Block Island. Offshore wind power is seen by the Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York State as being a major component of our energy future with now wind farms proposed south of Long Island, one to be built by Deepwater Wind, another by a Norwegian energy company. Meanwhile, all over the globe offshore wind farms have been going up.

Mr. Heronemus was a professor of civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He “is known the world over as the ‘father of modern windpower,’” states a website devoted to his work produced by the university’s Wind Energy Center.  https://www.umass.edu/windenergy/about/history/heronemus

He is “generally credited with the invention” of terms including wind farm “in wide use today. All the present researchers in wind turbines owe the grasp of the fundamentals to Bill Heronemus’ work of the 1970s, when he and his cadre published many, many reports on windpower, along with the earlier pioneers forming the backbone of all the engineering, which was yet to come.”

“Bill Heronemus was an engineer’s engineer. He was humble, and would have been horrified and embarrassed to see his life in print like this. But he gave us a vision and a legacy for our own dreams, and changed many lives,” it says. 

A 1968 statement by him is quoted: “In the immediate future, we can expect the ‘energy gap’ to result in a series of crises as peak loads are not met…The environment will continue to deteriorate in spite of ever-increasing severity of controls. Air pollution, oil spills and thermal pollution are likely to be worse, not better in 1985….[An] energy alternative must be sought.”

Mr. Heronemus “not only predicted the worldwide energy difficulties which were to come, including nuclear power plant failures, but saw the grand scale of future of renewable energy development,” says the website.

Nuclear power and Mr. Heronemus’s rejection of it—after being involved in it first-hand as a U.S. Navy captain engineering nuclear submarines—was pivotal to his renewable/alternative energy commitment.

Another University of Massachusetts website devoted to him, this one the “William E. Heronemus Papers,” notes: “After serving in the U.S. Navy, engineering the construction of submarines from 1941 until his retirement in 1965, Heronemus disavowed his work with nuclear energy and joining the University Faculty in 1967, dedicated his life to the study of alternative energy.” http://scua.library.umass.edu/umarmot/heronemus-william/

From work with nuclear power in the Navy, Mr. Heronemus, an Annapolis graduate with two advanced degrees, concluded it is deadly dangerous—and by, instead, harvesting the wind and using other safe, alternative energy technologies, unnecessary.

He came to Suffolk in 1971 and testified at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission licensing hearings for the construction of a nuclear power plant at Shoreham. He testified that a network of windmills should be built instead and they would produce as much power and, importantly, produce “no radiation, no nuclear waste” and thus be compatible with the environment and life. 

He received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Wind Energy Association in 1999 and in an acceptance speech said: “There is an absolute requirement for the Earth to remain in thermal balance within our solar system. There is only one ultimate solution to the global warming problem: total reliance upon solar energy. And the most productive of all solar energy processes is the wind energy process.” (Wind energy is caused by the sun heating different parts of the Earth at different rates.)

Mr. Heronemus passed away in 2002, at 82. His vision lives on and is on the way here and, indeed all over the world, to being applied.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.