NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY
Wind Pioneer Paul Veers: From Farm to Wind Farms, He's Aloft as New Senior Research Fellow

Tending cows on a Wisconsin dairy farm taught Paul Veers the value of hard work and also that he didn't want to be a farmer.

"The routine starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 8 p.m., seven days a week," said the newly appointed research fellow at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

As Veers was finishing his bachelor's degree, his father offered him a chance to take over the 160-acre farm, saying he'd keep the 35 cows around until his son decided. "I thought about it for a millisecond," Veers laughed. "I said, Go ahead and sell the herd. I'm going elsewhere.'"

After studying engineering mechanics at the University of Wisconsin (a degree that, he says, "allows me to not do anything practical whatsoever it's really fundamental, the mechanics of engineering"), he earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

In 1980, a rural connection helped launch his career in science and wind energy research when Veers interviewed for his first job in operations at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico. He met with "an old Tennessee farmer" who was impressed with Veers' background. "He knew that on a farm, when the machinery breaks, the farmer had to get out there and fix it. There's nothing else you can do."

Yet Veers' experience was different.

"My family wasn't very mechanical," Veers admitted. "I got the job under false pretenses" because his family relied on a friend who had a garage who could fix machines much more quickly.

Nonetheless, Veers joined Sandia's applied mechanics department, which consulted on projects across the laboratory. While he worked on a large assortment of technologies that included nuclear reactors, he also encountered wind turbines.

His future career took off. "Wind energy was hands down the most interesting," he said. "The field was wide open."

Back in the early 1980s, the question was: Why are these machines breaking, and how do we figure out how to build them so they don't break? "No one really knew how to do that," Veers said. "That's what drew me in."

The Turbulent World of Wind

Heading into the field of wind energy for a career wasn't exactly a safe choice at the time. Veers recalled that, early on at Sandia, he was introduced to a senior staffer in nuclear weapons research at a cocktail party. "He asked me what I was focused on, and I said wind energy," Veers said. The would-be mentor paused a moment, then said, "Oh, that is truly, truly trivial. You ought to find something worthwhile. That is never going to turn into anything."

Doubters did not deflect him. Veers persevered in the wild days of wind, when researchers did "dangerous stuff" with these balky new machines. And when federal funding became iffy for renewable energy development, he stayed put even as managers suggested staffers look elsewhere for secure jobs.

"I wasn't bright enough to realize this could be a problem," he said. Still, he was not convinced that wind energy was the solution.

"I really did not know if wind would become a major player," Veers said. "I did not have a passion. Originally, I thought wind energy was an amazingly interesting problem to solve."

Gradually, his viewpoint shifted. "The more I learned, the more I thought this could work," he said. "This could make a difference."

At that time, the general vision was that someday wind power might provide 5% of U.S. electricity. "Wouldn't that be a wonderful success?" he recalled thinking. Now, it's surpassed that figure and keeps climbing.

"Our sense is we're going to hit 10% easily," Veers said. "The goal is 50%. We now have the vision, if we keep pushing the frontiers with the technology, that it is going to increase to 20% or 30% globally."

For Veers, it is "amazingly satisfying to see that this work we're doing is paying off."

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