A Montana Rancher, the Son of a Memphis Policeman, a Jamaican Sprinter—and an Outdoorsman From Bavaria: The People Leading NREL

By Martin Keller, National Renewable Energy Laboratory Director

The stories I’ve shared this year from the chapters of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Clean Energy Innovators book have an epic sweep:

• There was former Chief Operating Officer Bobi Garrett, whose first “toy” was a hammer as her family built their Montana ranch homestead.
• You got to know Associate Laboratory Director Johney Green, a trailblazer in his own right, whose father became one of the first Black policemen in Memphis during the Civil Rights era.
• I introduced you to Dave Ginley, an NREL solar pioneer who admitted that he accidently blew things up in the basement of his house as a boy trying to build a rocket.
• We followed the journey of Deputy Laboratory Director Peter Green, once an Olympic hopeful from Jamaica, who left track to track his own course in renewable energy.
• We’ve seen through the eyes of young wind engineers trying to figure out how to stop runaway turbines—even if it meant using a crossbow to shoot an arrow with a rope through wildly spinning blades.
• And we’ve met Imogene Manuelito, who left her family on a Navajo reservation to help run NREL’s contracting services, as well as a buildings and thermal sciences researcher, Judith Vidal, who donated a kidney to her brother in Venezuela.

Download a copy of Clean Energy Innovators: NREL People Working to Change the World at this link, https://bit.ly/3hbryUt 

I could go on and on.

Hundreds of people from the pages of Clean Energy Innovators recounted their journeys from across the country and the globe to help with the U.S. Department of Energy’s renewable energy mission. Last month, I shared some stories of my predecessors.

The final chapter is one about me and our leadership team, past and present. It is included to give everyone a peek behind the scenes so that you can understand what we are trying to do to help save the planet.

So, I guess it is fitting that I tell mine, too, about growing up outside of Munich and loving nature. No need to go into detail here, though you can read it if you’d like.

But I do want to emphasize one point I made in the book. I’m passionate about science because science is a form of art. As I said in the book, “When you talk about science and art, they are not so different. Science is a way to express yourself, to learn about nature, engineering, about technology.”

That’s the essence of what we are trying to convey in our book.

NREL is about its people—artists really—across all our labs and offices, united by our mission. There were profiles of amazing visionaries who believed in renewable energy in the beginning. There are tales of the current scientists and leaders—who also excel outside the lab as parents, athletes, artists, and community volunteers. And there are glimpses of young postdocs and interns who will carry this cause forward.

These are the faces in the pages of Clean Energy Innovators.

We hope you have enjoyed getting to know some of them. And if you did, please share it with some younger people perhaps, or teachers, as well as members of your community, who are concerned about issues such as climate change and our planet’s health.

Let them get a sense of the range of outstanding people striving not only at NREL but also at other national laboratories, as well as in our partner organizations, to tackle our hardest challenges.

If you do, then we will consider our efforts to tell our story a success.