Congratulations to Heather Rhoads-Weaver, recipient of the Service in Community Wind Award, and to John Pimentel, recipient of the Community Wind Innovator Award!

 Distinguished Service in Community Wind Award for 2013

The Windustry Board of Directors along with the Community Wind Peer Group is pleased to announce the 2013 Distinguished Service in Community Wind Award. This award is given annually to a person who has made an exceptionally significant contribution to the establishment and growth of Community Wind as a uniquely valuable form of clean, renewable energy. The recipient of this award possesses outstanding dedication, excellence or achievement and has worked over many years to further the goals of community wind and distributed renewable energy. This person is an exemplary professional and a mentor for others. She is regarded as a creative leader in her professional field and embodies methods of practice and aspects of being that we aspire to ourselves.

The 2013 Distinguished Service in Community Wind award goes to:

Heather Rhoads-Weaver
Principal Consultant and Founder of e-Formative Options

Over the more than 17 years Heather has been involved in the wind industry, she has played key roles in a diverse array of distributed, community, and small wind projects. Working on a national basis with organizations such as the National Wind Coordinating Committee, American Wind Energy Association, and the Distributed Wind Energy Association. She started a non-profit NorthWest SEED and now runs her own consulting business. She has been honored by Women of Wind Energy for her mentoring of others. She has been prolific in her publications with the latest effort the annual Small Wind Market Report. Windustry and the 2013 Community Wind Peer Committee applaud Heather’s exceptional efforts, dedication and innovative approaches to help establish and grow the distributed wind and renewable energy market.

Community Wind Innovator Award for 2013 

The Windustry Board of Directors along with a Peer Group of Community Wind Colleagues is pleased to present for the second year the Community Wind Innovator Award. This award is presented annually to an individual who has made significant progress over the past one to two years in forging ahead with new policies, new approaches, new business models or new research to further community and distributed wind energy. This person's ideas and efforts have changed how we think about or perform our work. The recipient of this award has creative vision about implementing community and distributed wind; is immensely generous in sharing his/her time for the promotion of community and distributed wind; is a person of great heart. 

The winner of the Community Wind Innovator Award for 2013 is:

John Pimentel
President and Co-Founder of Foundation WindPower LLC

John is President and co-founder of Foundation Windpower LLC, which builds, owns, and operates wind projects in distributed “behind-the-meter” generation formats. The company has 16 distributed wind turbines totaling 22 megawatts of generating capacity with more projects under development. 

California has historically been a leader in renewable energy and wind energy in particular. But throughout its long history California had very little or no community wind installed. Then John and the Foundation WindPower team emerged on the scene. They have put together a “behind-the-meter” business model that works in spite of the way the state policy is written and implemented. They have 11 projects and have installed 16 commercial scale turbines. Windustry and the Community Wind Peer Committee applaud John and his team for their determination, creativity and financial acuity for developing a new approach for building community wind.

The Windustry Board of Directors thanks the 2013 Community Wind Peer Group for their nominations and selections for the awards.  The 2013 Community Wind Peer Group participants were Peggy Beltrone, Exergy Energy; Lisa Daniels, Windustry; Jim Duffy, Nixon Peabody, LLP; Larry Flowers, AWEA; Dan Juhl, JuhlWind; Jacob Susman, OwnEnergy; and Tom Wind, Wind Utility Associates.