Wind Energy

Paul Woodin receives Community Wind Power Innovator Award for 2012

The board of directors of Windustry, a nonprofit group that promotes community wind energy, and a committee of colleagues has selected the late Paul Woodin, former director of the Community Renewable Energy Association, an Oregon-based intergovernmental agency, to be honored with the Community Wind Innovator Award for 2012.

The full text of the award announcement follows:

Community Wind Innovator Award

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 Community Wind Innovator Award for 2012 is presented in memory of Paul Woodin. This is in recognition and in memory of his leadership, creativity and commitment to forging ahead with new policies and new approaches to expand community and distributed wind energy.

Paul Woodin

The words that come to mind when thinking about Paul are original, idealistic, and seeking a balance of fairness. He worked to get to common ground on community renewable issues. He worked to get a fuller understanding of core challenges in growing community wind

Paul was executive director of Community Renewable Energy Association (CREA) in Oregon, an intergovernmental agency that has both government and private groups. Their mission is to promote favorable policies at both State and Federal level for Community Renewable Energy Projects, defined as 20 MW and smaller. The projects are locally-owned in small hydro, geothermal, biomass, small wind, wave energy and other small renewable technologies. As strong supporters of community renewables, four of CREA’s seven board members are county judges and commissioners.

Lisa Daniels, Executive Director of Windustry, said, “I remember that Paul always had a Community Wind policy ‘wish list’ on the ready.”

Peer Group of Community Wind Colleagues

The Windustry Board of Directors thanks the 2012 Community Wind Peer Group for the colleague nominations and selections for the awards. The 2012 Community Wind Peer Group participants were Tom Wind, Wind Utility Associates; Kevin Schulte, Sustainable Energy Developments; Jacob Susman, OwnEnergy; Larry Flowers, AWEA; and Lisa Daniels, Windustry.

Tom Gray, www.awea.org/blog