By Nell Lake Photography by Christopher Churchill

IN the half-finished basement of his parents’ home in the Boston suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts, 21-year-old Michael Easton hunches over a long table, sweat on his brow. He thrusts a putty knife under the surface of a strange object lying on the table. It is an object like no other in the world: an innovative new blade meant to form part of a 6-foot-tall residential wind turbine. Easton designed it. The turbine will mount on a rooftop and supply electricity directly to the building below. With it Easton believes he can transform the way individual households get their power—and that he can help rescue the planet from such troubles as rising seas, worsening drought, and burgeoning disease. If all goes well. The blade—2 feet long, a foot thick, the color of greenish sea foam—looks like a huge slab of frozen fish. Easton has been struggling to pry the thin, top layer of this slab free of its particleboard mold for half an hour. He shimmies his knife, pulls, grunts, and finally gets a little lift on one edge.

“Usually it pops right off,” Easton says in his slight Kiwi drawl (he spent much of his childhood in his father’s native New Zealand). Usually trim and clean-cut, with short black hair and sleek glasses, today Easton is dusty, a bit haggard. His face bears the shadow of a beard. He wears a respirator, a black sweatshirt, and old jeans. The knife Easton is wielding has cut his hand, and a drop of blood has smeared on the mold. He pries again and the knife snaps. He straightens up and takes a breath.

For the last two weeks, Easton has been sleeping nights in his childhood bedroom and during the days taking care of his 15-year-old sister. His parents are overseas. Though he graduated summa cum laude six months before from Tufts University with a degree in mechanical engineering, and even though he races F18 catamarans and hopes eventually to qualify for the Olympic games, he’s a part-time chauffeur: His sister needs to be driven to her skating lessons.

It is two days before Christmas, and it’s clear he will fail to meet his goal of installing his prototype turbine on a building roof next month. He faces his first major delay in his plan to develop an exceptional product, win funding, create a successful company, make lots of money, and save the world.

MICHAEL EASTON has a particular kind of mind, and not just a smart one. His kind of mind thinks in variables. It likes to solve technical problems, leans toward math, algorithms, a clean structure, a smooth assembly, a sleek form. These days, we call people with such minds geeks, though probably they have been around for as long as humans have. One of them surely invented the round object that revolutionized transportation—and he or she probably endured taunts from burly hunter-types.

But Easton does not conform to the stereotype. His social circle is composed of fellow engineering graduates, sailing buddies, and old high school friends. He keeps in touch with his former long-term girlfriend, who’s studying Chinese in China. His physical feats also defy stereotype. He rides a mean kiteboard. “Anything you can do fast that involves wind, he’ll want to do,” says Sam Adelman, a sailing friend and fellow Tufts alum. But if a keen technical mind qualifies someone as a geek, Easton, athletic build and all, is definitely a geek. And that, these days, makes him almost hip.

Geek skills are in demand, and many people strive to be geeks, following the über-geek himself, Bill Gates, who became the wealthiest man in the world. Thousands of self-described geek blogs grace the web. A magazine called Geek Monthly, launched in 2006, boasts a circulation of 200,000. You can celebrate “Geek Pride Day” every May 25. Search amazon.com for “geek” and you’ll find geek autobiographies, books on what it means to be a geek, and books that help you determine if you are one.

For the record, I’m not. I don’t possess a particularly technical mind, nor do I surround myself with people who do. Following Easton around is, for me, a little like making an excursion into an alien culture. Easton may feel the same toward me. When he talks to me, he often makes inflections at the ends of his sentences. The tone in others can signal uncertainty, as in the teenager who says, “So I went to my friend’s house? We watched American Idol?” But Easton does this when he explains something he’s not sure I’ll understand, such as: “So it’s because your lift vector is at an angle in this case?” Or: “We’re trying to get an even load?” It’s as if he’s saying: “You keeping up with me here?” Unfailingly polite, he’s helping me along.

Geeks like him have evolved over the decades. Ten years ago, a 21-year-old Michael Easton might have toiled in his parents’ basement writing code for some new networking software. Thirty years ago, he might have slogged in a garage, living on pizza, building a new kind of computer. A hundred and seventy-five years ago, he might have been scheming, say, an industrial shoe-making machine while standing in a line, pounding nails into soles. Like the geeks who came before him, Easton has committed himself to solving the most compelling problem of his time.

In 1987, the year he was born, the media was ramping up coverage of global warming. Time magazine published a cover story, “The Heat Is On: How the Earth’s Climate Is Changing, Why the Ozone Hole Is Growing” The following summer, Al Gore held congressional hearings on the issue. At the hearings, a prominent climate scientist became the first to publicly declare that the greenhouse effect was no mere theory. By the time Easton was 10, “global warming” was a household phrase.

The data show that the climate is definitely changing. The question is what we’re going to do about it, and that’s a question aspiring world-changers take personally. The geeks among them have turned their smarts in unprecedented numbers to “clean energy”—innovations that power the planet while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. With some of the best young minds on the case—“100,000 people out there trying 100,000 different things in 100,000 different garages,” as global pundit Thomas Friedman put it—a breakthrough of some degree is no miracle; let’s hope it’s inevitable. In short, if people like Easton succeed, the geek shall inherit the earth.

Many are lining up as potential heirs. Rachel Segalman, a 33-year-old professor in chemical engineering at the University of California–Berkeley, has witnessed a marked change in her incoming students—and in herself—in recent years. Earlier in her career, Segalman says, she focused solely on science. But when she discovered that her research on polymers could be useful in the development of solar cells, she linked the planet’s fate to her career’s. “Then my students started being more motivated by having relevance to society,” she says, in addition to pure science.

To serve this growing number of clean-energy enthusiasts, three years ago a now-29-year-old aptly named Hank Green founded the website ecogeek.org to track developments in clean technology. “An eco-geek,” Green explains, “is a person who thinks that technology is not a force of evil; he or she cares about the environment and thinks that technology can be one of many factors in helping to save the planet.” He happily plays along with the stereotype: “They see a problem, and they want to create a solution, and they get so into it that they forget about everything. They forget about girls, they forget about having to pee. They don’t see whatever mess is around them, like the rotting bologna sandwich they forgot to eat.”

DOWN IN HIS BASEMENT, Easton is similarly absorbed. After finally snapping the last of the blade section off its mold, he straightens up. “Heey,” he says in a near groan, holding the thin, long slice in his fingers. Twenty-seven more blade sections to make. He sets this section, still usable, aside, and gets to work on the next.

A year before, as a senior at Tufts, Easton had taken an entrepreneurial finance course and written a business plan for a wind-turbine company that would avoid the “not-in-my-backyard” problem that tends to trip up large-scale wind projects. His idea at the time was to install small wind turbines on existing structures such as cell-phone towers. Easton had developed a fairly complete plan before he discovered that the small turbines on the market were too expensive to make the idea viable. He had been planning to enter the proposal in Tufts’ annual business plan competition, but his idea was a failure.

Not that he was giving up on wind power. After all, he’d been employing it for most of his life: He and his father, Chris Easton, each hold a pilot’s license. In recent years Michael had captained in and placed near the top of the most competitive catamaran sailing regattas. He also liked skippering his own boat, literally and figuratively. Sailing had given him a sense of independence and a competitive edge: “I like winning,” he says plainly. When Easton was 15, his sailing coach prodded the team by saying, “Second place is the first loser.” The phrase has formed a groove in Easton’s mind.

And so, soon after his business plan proved unworkable, Easton decided to create a plan for a residential wind company and still enter it in the Tufts competition. The deadline for entries now lay only days away, and he was scheduled for the Olympic classes catamaran regatta in Florida. Easton worked on his plan during the flight south and at night in his hotel after he had sailed. The company he envisioned would install small, affordable turbines on houses. His invention would use the most efficient blade design possible, a design he would have to figure out himself.

It happens he was already working on his senior thesis, “Current Inefficiencies in Small Wind Turbine Design,” and was interviewing turbine companies about their models. They were happy to help this curious student, unaware that he was to become their competition. He applied for grants to fund his venture once he graduated. He was getting about three hours of sleep a night.

Meanwhile, his business plan was the first loser. It placed second in the Tufts competition, behind a consulting firm that focused on intellectual property issues—and that had had more time to develop its plan.

Easton graduated in May, and the following month won a prestigious Compton fellowship of $35,000. After setting up shop in his parents’ basement, he got the software company SolidWorks Corp., to donate its 3D computer-assisted design program. Easton used it to create 15 virtual models of various vertical-axis turbine designs, incorporating what he had learned from his senior-thesis research. A rapid-prototyping company in Connecticut built the five-inch models from Easton’s digital files. Early in the fall, he tested them in his parents’ basement with a fan and a photo-tachometer, a hand-held device that read the speed of the turbine model as it spun.

By October 2008 he felt he had determined which was the most efficient: a sleek device with three curved, rib-like blades sweeping around a vertical axis. He named his new company MicroWind. The final product was to be sold for $5,000 and generate three kilowatts of power in 10 mph winds. The payback period for its owner—the time in which the savings on the energy bill would earn back the cost—would be five years. Existing wind turbines had a payback period of about a decade, unless the government kicked in incentives. Twenty-five people, many of whom he’d met at regattas, wanted to buy his first turbines. Once commercial production began, he would sell them in retail stores.

That year, the demand for wind power would grow 78 percent, and Easton’s competition would surge as well, with companies racing to develop and procure funding for new, more efficient wind-power technologies. He didn’t know it that Fall of 2008, but a year later Ace Hardware stores would begin sales of the first retail residential wind turbine, the Honeywell WT6000. At $4,500, its price would match Easton’s. But Honeywell’s claims about its product would be more modest than Easton’s goals for his: Honeywell promises 2,000 kilowatt hours of electricity from its turbine per year. Easton hoped to supply three times that. His final goal, that fall of 2008, was to do better than the competition, develop a multi-million dollar company, and “achieve market penetration.”

His entrepreneurial approach is typical of green geeks. “Some of the older folks, they’ll see ‘environmentalists’ on the one hand and ‘capitalists’ on the other,” says David Danielson, a founding program manager at Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy with the U.S. Department of Energy. Danielson, who holds a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was one of the founders of the MIT Energy Club. “The trend with younger energy innovators is to say, ‘OK, what are the problems we’re trying to solve? And how do we solve them?’ I consider myself kind of green, but I’m a venture capitalist, and I’m happy to make a billion dollars and change the world at the same time.”

Before he could make a billion, though, Easton first had to make a product that actually worked. In November, he and his father drove to Composite Solutions Inc., a small sailboat manufacturing shop in Hingham, a town south of Boston, to watch the turbine molds being made. Michael’s friend and sailing buddy Tripp Burd worked at the shop, and Burd’s boss had agreed to mill the two blade molds. Michael had sent a CAD file to Burd, who used it to create digital instructions for a computer-controlled milling machine. When the Eastons arrived, the huge machine’s drill-like tool was moving robotically along the surface of a particle-board slab, deeper with each sweep, creating a slope down and across the slab. Michael and Chris stared. “It’s a bit like having a baby,” Chris said. His son gazed as the growling machine cut. “It’s mesmerizing,” Michael said. His idea was literally taking shape.

Once the two molds were finished, the next hurdles arose: Easton planned to make 15 blade sections from each of the two molds. He would glue together five sections, each formed from one mold, to make the outside layer of each blade. Five sections from the other mold would make the inside of each blade. A total of 30 sections were required to make the three curved blades for a single turbine. Even then, he would have more work to do. Blade supports had to be built, and the blades and supports in turn had to be mounted on a specialized generator. Only then could he install his prototype on an acquaintance’s rooftop in western Massachusetts, collect data—and apply for first-round funding. Provided that the invention worked. Not only would it have to generate sufficient electricity; it had to keep from flying apart.

Test Tow: Easton uses a trailer to gauge the strength of his windmill.

FEBRUARY 2009: Both Easton’s morale and his company’s prospects get a boost. SolidWorks Corp., the firm that provided Easton with his design software, flies him to Orlando, Florida, for its annual conference. With some 800 employees and more than a million product designers and engineers, SolidWorks produces one of the most popular 3D design packages on the market. At the conference, Easton is a company poster child. Seated at the front of a large, empty hall, Easton watches as staff open the doors and more than 4,000 engineers, designers, and software enthusiasts file in, scrambling for seats. SolidWorks’ CEO, Jeff Ray, strides onto the stage and begins 

his keynote address. Toward the end of the talk, Ray describes Easton’s project. He holds up one of the miniature plastic models Easton generated using SolidWorks software. (It is not the design Easton has chosen to produce; to foil copycats, Easton has given Ray the least efficient one to display.) The CEO says, “I asked him, ‘Michael, what makes you think that you can do something that the great minds of the world haven’t been able to figure out?’

“Michael was indignant,” Ray says. “He said, ‘Well, because I know I can.’ Michael’s dream, he said, was to be able to walk down the street one day and look up and see this technology, making houses greener.”

It’s heady stuff for a 21-year-old entrepreneur, and it gets better: After Ray’s talk, the billionaire Sir Richard Branson walks on stage for an “interview” with Ray. Easton recalls the mogul’s words on stage: “I’m really interested in talking to this young man making the wind turbine.” The next evening the two entrepreneurs talk briefly. During the conversation, Sir Richard asks Easton to send him the executive summary of his business plan.

The day after he returns from Florida, Easton is back in his parents’ basement. Filling and sanding imperfections on the mold, he spends most of his days covered in fiberglass dust. He wears a respirator and jeans patched with duct tape. His mother snaps a picture of him in the basement one day. Fine white powder covers his face. Around his eyes and mouth, where his glasses and the respirator have been, show circles of clean, pink skin. He looks like an alien from another, less-green planet.

By late March, Easton has finished the blades, yet there is still a basic question that keeps Michael Easton up at night: Will the system hold up in the wind? “I’ve had some pretty bad nightmares,” he says. He makes a video to send to his friends, showing the turbine parts getting assembled for the first time in his parents’ backyard—and the blades taking slow, inaugural turns in a small breeze. The soundtrack is the Beatles’ tune “Don’t Let Me Down.”

One day in April, the question of the turbine’s stability, at least, will get answered. At the end of an old cracked runway on an abandoned U.S. Army airfield east of Boston, Easton sits at the wheel of a friend’s sports car. On a trailer hitched to the back of the car sits the assembled turbine on its model roof. And on this barricaded old airfield with its decaying air traffic control tower and overgrown weeds, Easton’s test takes on a clandestine air.

From his rearview mirror, Easton watches the steel-grey blades turn slowly in a light wind. His assistant for the day, Tufts sophomore Ben Segal, sits in the passenger seat, a laptop balanced on his thighs. “All right. Ready?” Easton asks him.

Segal clicks keys on the laptop and nods. Easton sets his watch. “OK, 15 seconds. Every time this beeps, you record. We’ll do 60 at 20,” Easton says, meaning they’ll drive for 60 seconds at 20 mph. He hits the accelerator and shifts gears.

“OK. Twenty,” Easton says.

The watch beeps. Segal leans over and eyes the voltage meter perched between the seats. He keys a number into a spreadsheet on the screen. The turbine spins faster.

Easton’s father, driving alongside in the “chase car”—Michael Easton’s Jeep Cherokee—watches the turbine. MicroWind’s first beta-tester, Frank Keefe, sits in the Jeep’s backseat, videoing the turbine’s performance. Keefe, who owns a small office-products company in a rural town two hours’ west, has come to get a look at the device that will go on his business’ roof.

The system’s electronic brake, meant to stop the blades in strong storms, has been working well. Vibration seems to be minimal. The system is solid. Easton gladly puts this issue to rest. But the essential question remains: How much voltage will this thing generate?

At the end of the runway, Easton slows the car. “What were you getting?” he asks Segal.

“It started out in the 90s and then went down to the 70s.”

Easton gives a terse nod. He’d been hoping for voltages of 200 or more. More work to do. In coming days, when he reviews his data from this test, he will have to figure out why the rpms aren’t what he expected. The generator squeaks; if that’s what is slowing the turbine, it will be an easy fix. On the other hand, the turbine blades may be the wrong size. Not so easy. So goes the life of the eco-inventor. You have to be persistent if you’re going to get rich and change the world.

“OK, let’s do one at 30,” he says and turns the steering wheel for another run.

Nell Lake lives and writes in western Massachusetts.