Sunpower founder William Beale laughs easily. He has the good-natured confidence that comes from nurturing a dream, building something great and leaving it in capable hands. “The time has come for Sunpower to really take off,” William says of the company he started 35 years ago. “And the time has come for me to go.” But how we got to this point, now that’s the interesting story…
Growing Up Greatest Generation
“I am genetically inclined to make gadgets; that’s just what my mind does,” William explains. His father was an MIT graduate and a civil engineer, but Black Tuesday didn’t discriminate. “The Depression booted you out of the comfortable spot you were born into and threw you into WPA camps,” he recalls. But William still made it to college on the G.I. Bill thanks to a stint in the Navy preparing for the invasion of Japan that fortunately never happened.
A stellar undergrad performance scored William a full-ride scholarship to the California Institute of Technology where he studied aircraft propulsion, but he also developed the awareness that would shape his life’s mission.
By the 1970s, William had a national reputation for being way ahead of his time on sustainable, clean energy production. Why was he thinking about an impending energy crisis long before anyone else? “It was my intent from Day One to save the world by way of renewable energy,” William says. “I got the idea from my CalTech professors who were telling me back in 1953 that the world needed to wake up!”
After CalTech, William worked for NASA and studied at MIT, but when his soon-to-be wife won a scholarship to Cambridge, he opted to tag along. “She had the job, and I was just having fun.” William would tinker with his inventions out on the green, amusing passing observers. “The Brits have a wonderful willingness to accept any degree of eccentricity,” he chuckles.
From Academic to Entrepreneur
As it turns out, Athens County and the British have something in common. When Carol and William returned to the U.S. to start a family, William applied for teaching jobs at several colleges. He chose Ohio University because it gave him the latitude to focus on his true calling: improving the thermal efficiency of the average American home. “Athens has an easygoing attitude toward crazy ideas,” William observes.
In 1964, William invented the free-piston Stirling engine that would become Sunpower’s signature product. “Ohio University gave me every encouragement to create Sunpower. They basically let me take the whole mechanical engineering machine shop out the door.”
With “not one iota of business background,” William made a huge leap of faith, leaving a tenured faculty position to change how the world runs, or at least what it runs on. But oil was just too cheap for clean energy to compete in the commercial market. NASA, the Department of Energy and other big government contracts keep Sunpower hopping.
The people of Sunpower have always been William’s true pride. These engineers and technicians will be the ones to bring energy efficiency to the masses. “I have no problem having people around here who are analytically a light-year ahead of me,” William beams. “Sunpower is the de facto graduate school of Stirling engines in the country.”
Something New Under the Sun
William served as Sunpower CEO and chair of the board until his heart attack in 1996, but even now, at 81, he spends every morning in a Sunpower workshop with senior technician Hans Zwahlen. Hans works full time to make William’s logbook concepts reality. “What I do is almost a real job, but it’s too much fun!” smiles Hans.
In addition to the eternal pursuit of a simpler, cheaper Stirling engine, William has a new pet project he developed in his off-hours: an automatic bicycle transmission. He’s teamed up with OU mechanical engineering grad student TJ Cyders to find funding and develop test products. TJ says, “This invention represents a very significant step forward for a lot of applications, from bicycles to electric vehicles and wind turbines.”
William’s work is his life’s passion. He doesn’t seem to understand the question, “What do you do when you’re not working?” His response: “I spend my nights thinking up new widgets, and I spend my days trying to make those widgets work.” That modus operandi is still bearing fruit.
