Doing Good for the World

Andy Kruse’s story is a classic one: he and a friend started messing around with wind turbines in a garage “out in the cinder hills” near Flagstaff, Arizona. The year was 1987, and he and David Calley had visions of harnessing this source of renewable energy for the betterment of humankind. David was making wind generators even when he was in high school in the early 1980s. With his technical expertise, and Andy’s marketing background, the pair founded Southwest Windpower and made a small wind turbine that they called the Windseeker.

Seventeen years later, David remains company president and Andy is vice-president. They bought an old bowling alley in Flagstaff and converted it into a manufacturing plant where some fifty people are employed making four basic wind systems. Each new version has involved close evaluation and improvements through constant research and development.

The company’s modest offices are near the plant. On the shelves in Andy’s office are books with titles like The Next Great Thing and State of the World. Maps on the wall show average windpower estimates in Egypt and the most favorable wind areas in the Dominican Republic. Though the month is March, Andy’s calendar remains on January.

Andy is like a constant-motion wind machine himself. He takes a moment to check something on his laptop – a link to anthropologist Richard Leakey, whose home in Africa is equipped with a Southwest Windpower turbine. It is such small-scale, individual-sized devices that the company now produces at its factory.

What motivated them to start the business? “I saw an opportunity to sell this around the world,” Andy replies. Two billion people are without power, he adds, and energy is needed in remote areas. “It’s about providing power, based on renewable energy, in small amounts,” he explains. “We’re in the wind business, but we’re really in the electrical business.” The fundamental importance of having electricity means people will have things like water, radio, telephone, and television. Most of these are beneficial to a way of life, but Andy also fully recognizes the cultural implications.

Southwest Windpower turbines have popped up in all corners of the globe, energizing research facilities in Antarctica, pumping water for nomadic herdsmen in Mongolia, and electrifying streetlights in Tokyo. Japan, he says, is one of their best customers because of the country’s commitment to renewable energy. The sleek, three-bladed turbines even adorn the tallest skyscrapers in the city. Andy turns to his laptop again and clicks on color photos of the company’s machines attached to recreational vehicles, sailboats, and even a friend’s tree house. They also see applications in other hard to reach or extreme places such as mountaintops and offshore platforms.

Obviously a busy man, Andy has a boyish ease about him, whether it’s talking to government officials about local ordinances, speaking with state commissions and big utility companies, or dealing with World Bank executives. And though the world is his marketplace, he vows that the “first vision” he shares with David is to look into rural areas in the United States, especially Indian reservations, which in some places still lack electricity. Two hundred hybrid systems using wind and solar photovoltaic cells have been installed across the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona and New Mexico. The second and bigger market is what he calls “grid-tied.” With the introduction of a new two-kilowatt turbine, an entire house can be powered, and the machine will pay for itself in five years. When the wind is not blowing, people can buy power from the electrical grid. When the wind is blowing, the meter runs in reverse back into the grid.

Andy is the first to admit that wind power is not for everybody. Because it’s not available on demand, wind will always be a secondary source of energy. “You won’t see wind turbines on every rooftop,” he allows. But he follows with a quick recitation of a statistic: “there are seventeen million homes in the United States on an acre or more of land.” That’s what Andy sees as a prime market, and he’d like nothing better than to capture a large portion of it. The secret to success in the United States, he believes, is to make wind power convenient. The technology must be reliable and cost-effective for people to choose to invest in it.

The basic concept behind harnessing the wind hasn’t changed much through the centuries, but the technology has been greatly transformed. Wooden blades have given way to composite materials, and alternators rather than generators are used, making the turbines highly energy efficient. The one “weak link,” explains Andy, remains storage in batteries. Though other possibilities have been explored, the lead-acid battery is still the cheapest and most reliable. But many of them are needed, and they have to be replaced periodically.

Before recommending wind turbines, Andy makes sure people first think about conservation. He wants people to understand how they use electricity every day, so that if and when they do commit to wind power they’ll already be using the most efficient appliances.

Andy admits that he once thought of the wind as a nuisance. But since he’s gotten into the business of supplying small-scale wind power, his feelings have changed toward this powerful force. Now, he says with a smile, “When I see a wind turbine spinning, I see someone doing something good.”