Electropolis: renewable energy renegade S. David Freeman takes charge at the New York Power Authority.

From his office on the 22nd floor of a black tower north of Times Square, S. David Freeman, the new president of the New York Power Authority (NYPA), can see why he isn't yet famous for solar power in the Big Apple. A cloud canopy hangs over New Jersey, hiding everything beyond the pewter-colored Hudson River. Higher overcast has blurred the sun into a vague lantern with a soft bulb. The people on the sidewalks carry black umbrellas, no doubt convinced that solar power belongs in pocket calculators and California, where Freeman did indeed become famous as the general manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), which has a field of photovoltaic panels beside its defunct nuclear power plant. But he's hardly deterred by gray weather.

"We need a bully pulpit that tells the American people that we can move over the next 30 or 40 years away from nuclear, away from oil, away from coal, away from all of it. We have the technology to use our renewable resources either in the form of electricity or of hydrogen to power all of our high-energy civilization. It's easier to do scientifically than to develop fusion power. It's easier than to get up to Mars," Freeman says from his own bully pulpit, a blue Victorian floral print chair that seems at odds with his Tennessee drawl, populist style, and his cowboy boot propped on his knee.

Renewable energy isn't alien to the East, which uses electricity from dams in Canada. Even solar power has sprung up under the changeable skies, from telephone book-size solar panels on highway emergency phone poles to long rooftop panels on an office in Albany and on a warehouse in Queens. The Public Service Commission that regulates New York's seven private utilities has asked them to install 300 megawatts of renewable energy projects by the year 2000. They will range from tapping the methane gas in landfills to using more of the woody biomass in the upstate forests and the downstate construction debris, shipping pallets, and other waste now leaving cities for landfills.

The Niagara Mohawk Power utility has built two wind turbines to tap the weather fronts blowing east from Lake Ontario. NYPA itself has measured the sunlight on the roof at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and installed solar panels at several locations. But, all in all, these projects are still a few seeds on a huge field of hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants and oil and gasburning utilities. Three hundred megawatts is about one hundreth of the state's power. This movement has long needed a dynamic leader: Enter David Freeman. "It's like night and day," says Mark Kapner, NYPA's manager of conservation and alternative energy, "Now we have someone who says, |What are you waiting for?'"

Created in 1931 to electrify rural New York, NYPA has become a giant wholesaler, supplying electricity to the seven private utilities and the M e t r o p o l i t a n Transit Authority which runs the subways and trains around New York City. It owns 12 power plants, including two dams on the St. Lawrence River and two nuclear power plants. One, Indian Point 3 on the Hudson River 35 miles north of New York City, has been closed since February 1993, after investigators found that workers had falsified log data, flunked drug tests, and failed to report operating problems on time.

Freeman, a self-proclaimed "utility repairman," hasn't yet formed an opinion about the future of Indian Point 3, but he has certainly shaken up NYPA, which had become a troubled agency under previous president Richard Flynn, who liked to spend money on parties and perks. (He even flew a NYPA plane to his weekend home in Rhode Island.) After arriving in March, Freeman quickly slashed $50 million from a $487 million operating budget and opposed NYPA's $5 billion contract with Hydro Quebec, which wants to build dams in the proposed James Bay II project that would damage a wilderness area the size of France,

At 68, Freeman has a slight stoop, deep lines hooked over his gray mustache, and glow-in-the-dark white sideburns, But he still burns with the passion for renewable energy that he developed in the mid-70s as a federal official trying to cope with the OPEC oil shocks. "This country has completely gone to sleep on the jugular vein of imported oil," he says. "How in the name of heaven can we be sitting here with 60 percent of the petroleum being imported, having had major recessions in the mid and late 70s and then having the worst fears of energy policy makers realized when we had to send the marines over to the Middle East a few years ago?"

At SMUD, Freeman led a renewable energy renaissance. After the voters closed the Rancho Seco nuclear power plant, the utility decided to replace all of those lost megawatts with a host of energy-saving programs and new renewable energy projects. It has bought thousands of old energy-hog refrigerators from customers to encourage them to buy more efficient ones, and it began planting 500,000 trees to offer Sacramento some natural air conditioning. It will install 25,000 solar water heaters on people's rooftops and erect 167 wind turbines with enough capacity to power 23,000 homes. "Freeman made SMUD into far and away the nation's top solar utility," says Donald Aitken of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "What we need is leadership far more than technological advancements."

Freeman didn't leave these ideas behind in California. He wants New York City and State to become a showcase for the world. "There's no place on Earth with more buses than New York City. We'd like to bring alternate-powered bus companies to our state as soon as we can." He takes from his desk leather pocket photo album (a gift from his employees at SMUD) and flips through models of electric cars as if they are his grandchildren. This fall the Environmental Protection Agency may require New York and the eastern seaboard to adopt California's automobile emissions standards to start selling electric vehicles by 1998, an idea embraced by Governor Cuomo. "You have 200,000 people a day riding an electric car every day called a train," Freeman says. "Why not have them finish their trip home in a modest electric station car?

"All those taxis in New York City could be electric taxis," Freeman continues. His favorite news clipping, in the December 10, 1898 issue of Harper's Weekly, is about electric cabs that looked like horse carriages with the driver seated up in the air behind the covered seats. "In 1898, there was a privately owned taxi cab company at 53rd and Broadway that hauled people around New York City at 30 cents a passenger mile. The cabs averaged 15 miles per hour. Today the average speed in New York City is seven miles per hour," he says. Renewable energy itself is often a matter of going back to the future, since many communities once powered themselves with wind mills, water wheels and wood stoves. But unless our leaders present the vision, it won't happen. And even then it won't be as easy as it sounds.

Freeman loves to tell the story of an Adlai Stevenson campaign speech for president in the 1950s. A woman came up afterwards and said, "Governor Stevenson, all the thinking people in America are for you." He replied, "Yes, ma'am. But we need a majority."

Contact: NYPA, 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019/[phone].