Company Profile
Approaching three decades of service in the industry, AWS Truewind continues to be a leader and innovator in renewable energy consulting. One of the key components to our continued growth and success is our highly skilled, customer-focused staff. The AWS Truewind team consists of approximately 75 meteorologists, engineers, and environmental specialists which are field-oriented and fully conversant with large commercial projects, utility electrical systems, remote field measurements, and distributed applications. This diverse group of professionals is led by a core leadership team consisting of the founding principals, directors and senior staff. These key leaders drive the company to constantly examine processes and establish best practices in an effort to ensure AWS Truewind is consistently delivering powerful solutions.
Principals
Dr. Bruce H. Bailey, CCM, PhD
Dr. Bailey has been involved in the renewable energy and environmental fields since the 1980s and is one of the world’s leading authorities on wind and solar energy applications. He has been the Project Director for hundreds of contracts in the areas of renewable energy technology applications, resource assessment, meteorology, and air quality on behalf of utility, government, and industrial clients. Technology applications include large and distribution scale wind and PV systems; grid-connected, remote, and hybrid designs; offshore wind project planning; and remote sensing. He has performed management and technical services in many areas: site selection, systems integration, engineering analysis, general contracting, due diligence, field measurements, wind flow modeling, wind energy forecasting/scheduling, economic planning, and the validation of value-added benefits. Dr. Bailey is widely published and has made numerous presentations at domestic and international conferences. He was the Program Chair for the AWEA Windpower ’95 Conference and was a U.S. Department of Energy Wind Program Reviewer for several years. He was the co-chair of the September 2006 AWEA Resource Assessment Workshop in Syracuse, NY. He has been a thesis mentor and guest instructor for several universities.
Dr. Michael C. Brower, PhD
Dr. Brower has been involved in the wind energy field since the late 1990s. Early in his career he conducted research and analysis on energy and environmental issues for federal and state governments, private business, and nonprofit organizations. Some major projects include an assessment of energy lending policies for the Inter-American Development Bank; a review of the British experience with electricity privatization for the National Council on Competition; and an assessment of the cost and feasibility of renewable energy targets for the U.S. electricity sector. In his roles as Principal of TrueWind Solutions and subsequently Vice President and Director of Meteorology and Modeling Services for AWS Truewind, Dr. Brower led the development of the MesoMap and SiteWind mapping and micrositing systems and the eWind forecasting system, acted as project lead for wind maps of hundreds of sites and regions around the world, wrote AWS Truewind’s Manual of Procedures for wind resource assessment and energy production studies, and led or participated in assessments of over 15,000 MW of wind energy projects. As Chief Technical Officer, Dr. Brower is responsible for company-wide research and development and technical standards. He participates in all aspects of AWS Truewind’s corporate management, product development and marketing.
Dr. John Zack, PhD
Dr. Zack has been involved with the development and application of physics-based numerical atmospheric modeling systems since the early 1980s. He also has considerable experience in the use of advanced statistical models, such as Artificial Neural Networks, to atmospheric prediction applications. He is an expert in both synoptic and dynamic meteorology and is very accomplished in analyzing model generated data and applying meteorological knowledge to understand and improve atmospheric modeling techniques. He is also a specialist in the application of atmospheric model products to solve industrial requirements. Dr. Zack is now recognized as a leading authority in the application of atmospheric modeling techniques for the purpose of producing wind maps and forecasts for the wind energy industry. He has great expertise in modeling system design and in many programming languages including Fortran, Unix shell scripts, Basic, Pascal and Perl. He has been the principal investigator of several multi-year research projects funded by a diverse mix of federal agencies including the Department of Defense, NASA, the Department of Agriculture and Department of Commerce - NOAA. He has also published numerous papers and peer-reviewed journal articles. His vast business experience includes founding and managing all aspects of a small company dedicated to atmospheric modeling applications in a variety of industries. He has several years experience teaching meteorology at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
Directors and Senior Staff
Dr. John Manobianco, PhD
Dr. Manobianco has been involved in the field of applied meteorology and atmospheric science since 1988. In his current role Dr. Manobianco is responsible for managing and sustaining basic and applied research projects to support company objectives and client-sponsored initiatives. Prior to this assignment, Dr. Manobianco was leading all aspects of the company’s meteorological work, including analysis of wind, solar and other meteorological data, assessment of energy resources on both regional and local scales, resource mapping, and estimation of energy production from wind and solar projects. Dr. Manobianco’s extensive career in the meteorology and atmospheric science fields includes nearly fifteen years at ENSCO, Inc. During his tenure with ENSCO, Dr. Manobianco was a program manager for NASA’s Applied Meteorology Unit and later promoted to Director of Advanced Technology. In this position, he established a new business area focused on micro and nanotechnology for environmental and defense applications. He holds advanced degrees in meteorology and atmospheric science with more than twenty years of experience as a manager, business developer, and technologist.
Eric White
Mr. White has been involved in the renewable energy, power generation, and aerospace fields since the early 1990s. Mr. White leads the Consulting Services group at AWS Truewind, which supports the company’s core services areas of resource mapping, energy assessment, project engineering, due diligence, performance evaluation, and forecasting for both wind and solar programs. Prior to this assignment Mr. White led the engineering department and was instrumental in the enhancement of the company’s energy assessment practices, due diligence services and operational wind plant performance evaluation methods. His extensive background includes operational leadership and development of state-of-the-art wind tunnel laboratories and fuel cell test facilities, leadership of a composites laboratory, technical leadership of product development for advanced technology power generation products, design and evaluation of steam turbine-generators, as well as various safety, certification and reliability assessments. He is active in numerous industry groups, including member of the US Technical Advisory Group for IEC TC88 (Wind Turbines), and the IEC working group for standard 61400-12-3 -Wind Farm Power Performance Testing, and several AWEA working groups. He has taught classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and is an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate College at Union College. He holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in aeronautical engineering from RPI.
Daniel W. Bernadett, PE
Mr. Bernadett’s career, which began in the late 1980s, includes a broad range of renewable energy applications and disciplines including: wind energy and photovoltaic systems, system design and integration, siting and project development, mechanical and electrical (both AC and DC) subsystems, field installation and data acquisition, maintenance, due diligence, aerodynamics, financial analysis, reporting, and technical training. His career at AWS Truewind began in the early 1990s and since that time Mr. Bernadett has been the project manager for a few thousand megawatts of projects in the U.S. and Canada. This experience encompasses numerous wind and solar technology and resource assessment studies for both domestic and international clients. Mr. Bernadett is a licensed professional engineer in the State of New York.
Michael J. Markus
Mr. Markus has been involved with the application of meteorological measurement and analysis techniques to the renewable energy and air quality fields since the early 1980s including multiple years of experience in atmospheric research and remote sensing for severe storms. His knowledge of the North American wind resource and vast experience with the interpretation of wind flow characteristics over complex terrain and siting of prospective wind power plants makes him a powerful asset to the AWS Truewind team. Mr. Markus has conducted comprehensive wind resource and energy production prediction assessments for hundreds of projects. He has managed numerous meteorological monitoring projects involving site selection, permitting, instrumentation, and data analysis and reporting. In addition, Mr. Markus has experience with wind mapping, GIS and expert system forecasting tools.