Prison Epiphany

The ocean turbines Herb Williams imagined in jail are big business now

Even when the narcos handed over a brown paper grocery bag full of $100 bills, Herbert Williams says, he was mostly thinking about the boat. They’d hired him to build a superfast catamaran, telling him they needed to expedite deliveries of certain goods from Colombia to, uh, Germany. Williams had experience building fast, double-hull fishing vessels, but he’d always dreamed of inventing something bigger, more outlandish. Such was his excitement in having the dream financed that he willfully ignored the warning signs. “I’m building a boat,” he remembers thinking. “Chevrolet doesn’t ask customers what they intend to do with its cars.”

Working out of South Florida, Williams drew up plans for a 96-foot, wave-piercing craft with twin 1,000-horsepower diesel engines. He named it Lady Jessica, after his young daughter. He rented cranes, bought quarter-inch steel plate to form the hull, and hired a crew to help him put it all together. (This was 1987, so you can imagine how Crockett-and-Tubbs everyone looked.) In its first sea trial from Port Charlotte, the boat sliced through chop where slower craft would have bounced around, wasting energy. “It was beautiful,” Williams says. “From the air, it looked like a delicate water spider or something from Star Wars.” At 30 knots (about 34 miles per hour), it cruised faster than anything its size, even faster than the U.S. Coast Guard cutters policing the shores.

As the crew navigated back to the harbor, the maritime radio crackled with the voices of excited fishing captains marveling over the strange boat. But once the catamaran docked, dozens of uniformed law enforcement officials descended, putting everyone aboard in handcuffs. An “A-bomb for smuggling,” they called Williams’s creation. He was convicted of conspiracy to transport cocaine after refusing to disclose the names of his Colombian clients. He didn’t talk, he says, because he feared for his life. Before 1987 was over, the judge sentenced him to 10 years in federal prison.

Federal records show Williams was transferred among penitentiary facilities 48 times in the first two years—an effort to get him to name names, he says. Each time, he found himself chained to the floor of a bus thick with diesel fumes, listening to hours of ’60s rock at deafening volume. Any prisoner new to a facility must sleep for several weeks in the prison “fish tank,” a solitary cell typically without bedding or heat. The next transfer always came right when Williams was about to get a permanent cell with a bed. In the fourth year, he received word his wife had divorced him.

Slowly, things got better. Without explanation, the transfers stopped. Williams started getting time off his sentence, a combination of good behavior and prosecutorial discretion. Most important, a fellow inmate taught him technical drawing. Soon, hundreds of drafting pages issued from his pencil, detailing some 32 truly weird aquatic contraptions: catamaran-shaped cruise ships, giant V-shaped crudeoil collectors, a propeller with way too many blades. “I had to make these things to keep a sense of purpose,” he says. “Maybe I made them to show I exist.”

Prison was horrible, of course. But it also turned Williams into a full-time inventor. “Prison set me down, allowing me to stop and think,” he says. Williams’s brainstorms eventually produced a design for one of the first commercialscale turbines meant to convert tidal energy to electricity. Irish company OpenHydro later bought the patents Williams secured for his design and used them to create the first and still-biggest source of tidal power sold to consumers through the U.K. grid. In 2015, OpenHydro was sold for $173 million to DCNS Group, a French military contractor. The parent company is deploying massive 300-ton, 52-foot-high versions of the Williams design in Canada’s Bay of Fundy as well as in Brittany, France. While Williams was locked up, it would have been hard to imagine that one of his ideas would help power tens of millions of homes. Or that as a tinkerer with no engineering education, he would secure 18 patents or build technology for a business that competes against Lockheed Martin, Siemens, and General Electric. Nothing so optimistic entered his mind during his surreal first few months riding what he calls the diesel-therapy bus.

In 1991, at the age of 48 and just shy of five years in prison, Williams was paroled. He gathered up his blueprints and the $27 in gate money from the feds and moved to Palatka, a spot in central Florida where nobody knew him. In this rural town of 12,000 along the

St. Johns River, 60 miles by water to the ocean, Williams slowly rebuilt his life. He started a business driving pilings into the St. Johns to build docks. That provided a steady paycheck, which meant he could start tinkering again.

For decades, ocean turbines have posed a tough engineering challenge. Without extra armor, the machines typically don’t survive saltwater or the microorganisms within it. And the turbine blades that work great on land often can’t handle the stress of the water, roughly 800 times denser than air. The conventional solution has been to use carbon fiber or other exotic polymer reinforcements to make what’s basically a stronger, more durable—and much more expensive—version of the threebladed machines you see on a wind farm.

Williams’s first big innovation was to bolt the rotor blades to the rim of the turbine, like the spokes of a wheel, giving them more support. The new shape improved power generation: As any kid knows, a bike wheel spins slower at its center and faster at its rim. Likewise, a traditional turbine’s central shaft turns relatively slowly, so engineers usually connect it to a gearbox to reach the speed needed to yield AC power compatible with the grid. Williams started thinking about ways to harvest power from the faster outer rim of his turbine.

In his dock-building machine shop—a windowless, corrugated-metal hut sheltered by two oaks—he set up a makeshift vertical lathe capable of milling a huge, 16-foot-diameter steel rotor. To make the whole rim into one big generator, such a wheel had to be less than a sparkpluggap’s distance from the inside of the turbine’s frame. First, he built a giant turntable out of a semitruck’s axle, which he used to spin the rotor against the lathe, shavings falling to the ground until it was perfectly round to within less than five-thousandths of an inch. He tested four prototypes for strength and mechanical soundness in the water, and when each failed, he threw it on a scrap heap that remains on the property today, like a pile of rusty Ferris wheels.

On the fifth try, Williams thought he had the right blend of strength and precision. With assistance from an engineer, he added magnets to the rotor and hand-wound conductive coils to the turbine’s steel-framed casing to make the spinning wheel itself the generator. By strategically placing additional magnets, he kept the parts from ever touching, meaning they didn’t need lubrication. Working with such fine tolerances, Williams had to make sure the turbine wouldn’t seize in cold ocean water. So he dragged an old aboveground swimming pool to the workshop, filled it with four truckloads of ice, and dunked the turbine to see if it would spin freely. He envisioned turbines with maintenance scheduled once a century.

Other engineers helped along the way, including some from the University of Florida, the U.S. Navy, and, later, the Department of Energy. But collaborators say Williams’s biggest advantages are the instincts he honed as a boat

builder and fisherman. “Herbert’s often more knowledgeable about the engineering side of his machines than my Ph.D.s,” says Energy Department researcher Rob Hovsapian.

In 2004, Williams quit building docks to focus on research and development. He married Cornelia Danese, the vice president of a local phone company, and she agreed to manage his business as an equal partner. Together they hired a small staff and raised money from friends and neighbors. The big break came later that year, when they attracted interest from Brendan Gilmore, the future co-founder of OpenHydro. He brought a crew of electrical engineers to Palatka to verify Williams’s claims.

During a test run in the St. Johns, towed behind a homemade barge, the 16-foot prototype began to spark as its wires melted down in the water. But the turbine yielded enough current to power a small neighborhood, and that was good enough for Gilmore, who bought Williams’s intellectual property.

OpenHydro was assigned the patents in a 50-50 split of stock in the private company. The company also retained Williams as a consultant and made him a director. Over the years, however, Williams began to feel his advice was less welcome. He removed himself from the board in 2007, when the press took notice of his conviction, though he says he remains friendly with company executives. “We are grateful for the contribution that Herbert Williams made in the early years of the business,” Gilmore wrote in an e-mail. “We understood and respected Herbert’s decision to withdraw from the business nine years ago and wish him well with his future endeavours.”

In the last few years, as tidal-energy generators neared large-scale rollouts, turbine tech became a valuable commodity. (GE, for example, acquired Alstom’s energy divisions and Atlantis Resources purchased turbine maker MCT from Siemens.) DCNS bought OpenHydro as a way to diversify its warship-making business. “We’ve improved the design to make it more efficient, more robust, and cheaper, but from Day One, we didn’t change the principles of the turbine,” says Thierry Kalanquin, chairman of OpenHydro under DCNS. “It’s the only one designed for the sea, not for the wind and adapted to the sea.”

Williams made millions from the sale of OpenHydro. He declines to discuss specifics, but it was enough to finance a wind-energy startup over the past eight years and the 520-acre compound in Palatka that he and his wife own. He’s now 73. He’s compact and usually wears jeans, a collared print shirt, boat shoes, and a scuffed Timex. He still works from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. in his workshop, which is now a little bigger—the compound includes a 50,000-square-foot fabrication plant and a freshly paved airport runway.

The plant is alive with the sounds of cranes and lathes and the occasional concussive thump of a fallen 70-foot steel tube. Welders are making metal pieces of staggering scale, some higher than 20 stories, some bigger around than a Boeing 737. They’re building parts for a combo generator/pump Williams has sold to the Energy Department. He says he thought of the idea in his prison cell, inspired by the multibladed windmills that helped pump water in the Old West.

His latest venture, Keuka Energy, is focused on this kind of wind machine. The prototype carries the same doughnut shape of his earlier turbines but uses an enormous drive belt to turn a pneumatic pump, yielding compressed air that can be converted into energy. In early tests at Texas Tech University, the machine captured low-altitude gusts of wind better than traditional turbines, and officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture say it may be able to replace diesel generators; they’re trying it out as part of an environmental project in Texas, using it to force water from deep underground. “It’s got a pretty high output in terms of wind to energy,” says Jerry Hatfield, director of the USDA’s research lab. “We’re considering whether it can be used as a very efficient pump.” Hovsapian at the Energy Department says the combo generator/ pump looks a lot easier to maintain than an industrial turbine. “Once he resolves a few issues,” he says, “a bicycle mechanic can work on it.”

A patent approved in November reveals Williams’s longer-term plans. It details a V-shaped barge perhaps a mile long sitting in the middle of the Atlantic, a vast repository for liquid air that can be used to drive gas turbines and generate electricity. Large rim-driven windmills store the air in supercold tanks in the barge’s hold. Periodically, natural gas tankers take the air to gas-fired power plants around the world, where it can be warmed into gas to spin the turbines. It all amounts to an efficient way to store wind energy using relatively cheap, existing infrastructure. Williams says that while he may not see this one through, it’s worth starting. “You have to get your hands on something in order to build it right,” he says. “If all the entrepreneurs and tinkerers in the country left it to GE and Westinghouse, we’d be in big trouble.”

Williams says he’s still drawing inspiration from his darker days, too. The Palatka compound has housing for his employees, including the occasional ex-con. “When you go to prison, the public turns their backs on you,” he says, but as long as convicts have ideas, they aren’t out of options. “There are possibilities.” <BW>