Interview with Trudy Forsyth

Catherine: Hi, I’m Catherine McLean, Founder and CEO of Dylan Green, and today I have with me Trudy Forsyth, Managing Director at Wind Advisors Team. Thanks for joining me today, Trudy.

Trudy: Thanks for having me.

Catherine: Where in the world are you?

Trudy: I am in Broomfield, Colorado, about 12 minutes east of the National Wind Technology Center, which is part of NREL.

Catherine: Amazing. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about your role at Wind Advisors Team?

Trudy: Fair enough. Trudy Forsythe, I started a consulting company called Wind Advisors Team in 2012, after I took a buyout from NREL. The focus of Wind Advisors Team is really on small and distributed wind markets, technologies, and policies.

Catherine: Your academic background in mechanical engineering and you worked, as you mentioned, at NREL. What inspired you to specialize in wind, and how did your early experiences shape your career path?

Trudy: Great question. So for me, I was working for a large aerospace company that was southwest of the Denver metro area. And a friend of mine who had a PhD in chemistry said, hey, you know, I’m going to NREL for lunch today. And I think there might be some interesting positions. Do you want to come with me? I said, sure. So we went over there, and indeed there were several positions in the Wind Division. And I applied for both of them. They had hundreds of applications there at the time. I didn’t necessarily know that I wanted to be in wind energy at that point. But my dad had built a passive and solar house, so I was already clued into renewable energy. And that spoke to my heart more than aerospace did.

Catherine: What was it like to start and run your own wind energy consulting company?

Trudy: It was a total joy. All of my wind experience, both at NREL and in my own company, have been pretty amazing. Wind is a relatively young industry. So that gave me a lot of flexibility in NREL to sort of pick and choose what type of projects I was interested in. And when I transitioned from NREL, the distributed wind sector is really the small little cousin of the big wind sector. It’s very small. People know each other, not just nationally but internationally. So it opened up some work that I was doing through International Electrotechnical Commission Standards and International Energy Agency work. And I did a lot of consulting for not just folks in the U.S. but folks in the world interested in small and distributed wind.

Catherine: Well, that’s really great. During your tenure at NREL, you led this small and distributed wind program for 18 years. What were some of the most significant challenges and achievements that you had during that period?

Trudy: Well, you know, compared to aerospace, wind energy is not very misogynistic. But there still is misogynistic practices in the wind business today. So it was always challenging being the lone woman in the room. And yet there was opportunities because I was the lone woman in the room. Many of my colleagues said to me, you have a much bigger toolkit than I do. And indeed, I ended up in the management space because I could communicate both verbally and in written form.

Catherine: As a co-founder and past president of Women of Wind Energy, now WRISE, what motivated you to establish the organization? And can you share a moment that really illustrates the impact it’s had over the past 20 years?

Trudy: Fair enough. I was inspired by a young woman who was working at NREL named Mia Divine who said, we need to do something about the small number of women in the audience at the wind power conferences. No doubt that was absolutely true. And so we started off with Women of Wind Energy, worked with Windestry and Lisa Daniels because they were an existing 501c3. And then, of course, there was the wonderful steering committee of really super dedicated women to this specific issue. And I don’t know how many years we met once a week. These were high powered women. I was just a staff member at the National Lab. I wasn’t running a company. But everyone was very dedicated. And as far as I’m concerned, we hatched WOWI through a group effort. One of the most interesting things was the first year that we did it in 2005. We did it in conjunction with the American Wind Energy Association Wind Power Conference. And we had a room set aside. And we printed up 125 programs. And by the time Lisa Daniels and I got into that room, we could hardly believe it because of the high pitched voices that we heard coming down the hallway. We didn’t think there were 125 women in the wind business at that time. And there were more people in the room than that. We ran out of programs. And it was very clear to all of us that there was a need. There was a need to empower women.

Catherine: Right. I love that story. Where was that?

Trudy: That was in Colorado. It was the Wind Power Conference. And I can’t tell you what month because they all went down. But June maybe? 2005.

Catherine: Oh, that’s great. So as a woman leader in clean energy, what are some of the major challenges you faced and how did you navigate or overcome them?

Trudy: The major challenges for me were restrictions that were artificial that were placed on me. And some of those I just would blast past. Others of them I would say, you know, live to fight another day. And you continue to work with your colleagues trying to get them to understand and respect where you’re coming from and what you’re contributing to the overall mission. That challenge has not died, unfortunately. But everyone has more women now in their organizations and for-profit boards specifically are targeting women because they realize that adding women affects their bottom line. It makes them more profitable. So, you know, that was all good.

Catherine: There was someone I interviewed the other day and she said, I don’t need help, but I don’t need obstacles. Just take it out of the way and let me do my job.

Trudy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I could go on ad nauseam about this question, but I think, you know, I don’t want to focus on the negative. I want to focus on the positive.

Catherine: That’s right. I like that. For emerging leaders, especially women and people of color, what advice would you offer about finding their voice or advancing in the industry?

Trudy: I think as women, we have to be very clever in what we say yes to. So the challenge is actually saying no and learning to say no. It’s something that I got more comfortable with as I got older and matured. Initially, I’d say yes to everything and then I’d be organizing somebody’s birthday party or entertainment for people visiting at the National Wind Technology Center. You have to be very careful to pick and choose the things that you say yes to and have those things be directly relatable to the bottom line of whatever your business or company is. If you do too many of those extra credit social things and actually I think works against you. Then there’s an expectation that you’ll do that all the time. Yeah. And of course, then your colleagues don’t see you as a valuable member of the technical staff.

Catherine: No, I agree with that. What does being an ally mean to you and how can allies support the WRISE community?

Trudy: This was the question that you asked that I contemplated the most because both allies and enemies can help you move forward. You know, enemies keep your friends close and your enemies closer is an adage that I think makes a lot of sense. I think to have good successful ally relationship works, work you need like a clear boundary. You do this and you do that. And the fuzzier that boundary is, the more misunderstandings can come up. And with misunderstandings, your relationships deteriorate.

Catherine: As WRISE marks 20 years, how do you envision the organization’s role in shaping the next two decades of renewable energy leadership?

Trudy: So early on, I think in 2007, we had a facilitated WOWI steering committee. And the facilitator asked us, and she passed out little sticky notes, she asked us to write out what would we consider an example of when WOWI was successful. What would that be? And for me, it was when men were coming to WOWI events because the education was valuable, the networking was valuable. So I tend to look at WRISE the same way. Over time, the more valuable WRISE is to the industries that it represents, the more likely it is for men to participate.

Catherine: That’s really interesting that you say that because I was at the rise event at Solar Plaza. And I noticed that there were quite a few men. And I thought maybe it was because of the booze or like the food or something. I’m so cynical.

Trudy: Don’t underestimate that stuff. It always works.

Catherine: But I thought to myself, what are they doing here? And so maybe there’s, you know, maybe what you’re saying is I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, like that it’s a positive that they’re there.

Trudy: Yeah, I think in the end, sort of kind of these establishments of groups go back to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Someday merged to be the Scouts, not boys or girls, but together. And I think the same is probably true with WRISE. I think it would be very interesting, particularly if these men, if you could know their demographics, were they young men? Probably more likely than older men. What is motivating for them? In my career, I found that men were more supportive of me if they had daughters that had a technical mind or sisters or aunts or, you know, some strong influential figure in their family life. So for some men, it’s extremely foreign. Maybe they’ve only had sons, so they don’t really think about things in terms of girls or daughters.

Catherine: Or they’ve always seen women in a certain light. All right. Well, thank you so much for speaking to me. And will you be at the gala?

Trudy: I will be at the gala.

Catherine: I will be meeting you in person.

Trudy: Yes. There’s one more thing I’d like to say. And that is, I think that the misogynistic attitude that was so dominant in my working career and was beginning to let up over time is now coming back.

Catherine: I totally agree with you.

Trudy: In a scary way. Women have things to contribute. In fact, at one point, I thought, WOWI, we became a good old girls network. There were business deals going on among women that could be implemented much more rapidly than the normal, the normal channels. So we need all of our intellectual capital engaged at solving the renewable energy problem slash opportunity and isolating just one group, women, in this case, are not necessarily helpful for the growth that the planet needs.

Catherine: I totally agree. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and all the work that you’ve done on our behalf over the past decades. It’s much appreciated.

Trudy: You’re so welcome, Catherine. Go and put your energy towards it and make something out of it happen.

Catherine: Thank you.

Trudy: You’re welcome.