A Cigar Smoker, Earth Day Organizer, Astronaut, and an Immigrant’s Son all Became NREL Directors

By Martin Keller, National Renewable Energy Laboratory Director

The opening paragraph in our Clean Energy Innovators: NREL People Working to Change the World chapter about my eight predecessors sums up all our different backgrounds:

“A cigar smoker from Philadelphia who had worked in solar research for years in Princeton, New Jersey. A political activist instrumental in launching Earth Day. An astronaut admiral. The son of an illegal Mexican immigrant. These are some of the directors who have taken the aspirational ideal of a renewable energy institute and made it a reality.”

Download a copy of Clean Energy Innovators: NREL People Working to Change the World at this link, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy22/83177.pdf

Although some of these men have passed on, I have met a number of them and drawn from their experiences. That’s the mark of a laboratory such as NREL: It is young enough to still be evolving, but old enough to have a backstory and tradition. Much like a startup, we began in 1977 as the Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI) in Golden, Colorado.

The first laboratory director, Paul Rappaport, had joined the RCA Corporation in 1949, working as a researcher studying energy conversion and developing solar photovoltaic cells. When the Carter administration was looking for a director for the new solar lab, his name surfaced. His tenure was over too quickly, cut short by cancer, but he did set the foundation for what NREL—then SERI—became: a place where ideas flourished, the biggest challenges were accepted, and no renewable energy technology was overlooked.

Others added to this leadership mosaic: Denis Hayes—the national organizer of the April 22, 1970, Earth Day—became second director of SERI, serving from 1979 through July 1981. Richard Truly, an astronaut who led NASA through a harrowing period, also took the director’s chair. And my predecessor, Dan Arvizu, learned the art of salesmanship from his father, selling renewable energy instead of shoes.

We hope you get a sense of the work of these men and those who have been on the journey. Next time, I’ll include my story along with the many other laboratory leaders who refused to accept the status quo—and dreamed of a way to cleanly power the world.