At the Power-Gen conference in Orlando, Florida, I was glad when I came across the small booth of Clipper Wind – a familiar firm that I have had the utmost respect for. For those of you who don’t know, Clipper Wind was started up by the legendary James Dehlsen, who used to live among wind turbines in the Tehachapi Mountains in Kern County California back in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I actually once spent a night there, and I will never forget walking out into the night and seeing (and hearing the swoosh-swoosh) of Danish Vestas wind turbine blades spinning all around me, the full moon casting eerie moving shadows.

Dehlsen started his foray into the wind business in 1980 with a company named Zond Systems, which ultimately brought Vestas into the U.S. market, a company that soon became the world’s largest supplier of wind turbines. Dehlsen ended up selling his Zond to Enron, a turn of events I chronicled in detail in my 2001 book published by Island Press and entitled Reaping the Wind: How Mechanical Wizards, Visionaries and Profiteers Helped Shape our Energy Future. Ironically enough, when Enron went down after the California energy crisis of 2000-2001, the wind unit was the only unit to survive and still turn a profit.

Enron Wind was purchased by General Electric (GE), which then became the largest wind manufacturer in the U.S. Meanwhile, Dehlsen began exploring the design and development of a distributed drive train for marine renewable technologies. The brilliance of the design was to spread the large loads expected from ocean currents into four instead of just one gear system. Since marine renewables are 800 times more energetic than wind, this was a brilliant idea and key innovation.

But as luck would have it, the GE purchase of Enron Wind freed up Dehlsen to re-enter the wind business, as it nullified a non-compete clause (which also expired after 5 years.) Dehlsen deftly sought federal and state R&D funding to adapt his distributed drive train to new wind turbine designs in a brand new company he created with his son, Brent. (The firm was named Clipper Wind because the Dehlsens were avid sailors and fans of the old-school clipper ships that once sailed the seas.)

Due to their respect for the Dehlsens, many of the original Zond team came back to work with Jim and Brent, including key players at GE. Starting from scratch, they developed a series of innovations in wind turbine designs, and began selling a 2.5 MW “Liberty” wind turbine in 2006, and racked up orders for over 2,000 of the machines. Like the rest of the wind industry, however, many of the first generation machines had gearbox and blade problems during the wind boom of 2006-2008. Not to be deterred, all of these failed components were replaced, leading Clipper to come up with innovative repair techniques that avoided costly large cranes. (The company also began work on a 10 MW “Britannia” wind turbine for offshore wind power markets; for sense of scale see graphic below.)

This retrofit program had a large price tag, however, and United Technologies (UT) of Hartford, Connecticut stepped in to purchase 49.9 percent of the firm in 2009. But low natural gas prices hit the domestic wind industry hard this year, and on December 15th – while I was at Power-Gen – UT purchased the remaining shares of Clipper for $223 million, and Dehlsen officially cut his ties with the second wind company he nurtured for so long — and which has deep ties with the large corporate players that now dominate the wind business.

I hope to catch up with Mr. Dehlsen next year, as he is now turning his sights back to ocean current and wave energy devices with yet another firm, Ecomerit Technologies. I have no doubt that he and his son will make waves in the marine renewables space, too.

Photo by Clipper Windpower

Peter Asmus is an analyst at Pike Research specializing in renewable energy.