John Obermeier
President and licensed Professional in Mechanical Engineering
Education:
B.S. Mechanical Engineering
Montana State University, (1973)
M.S. Mechanical Engineering
Montana State University, (1975)
Biography:
John Obermeier is the founder and President of Otech Engineering, Inc. As President, John oversees company operations to insure customer satisfaction, quality service, and cost effective management of resources. He also holds a professional engineering license in the state of California as a Mechanical Engineer.
John began his professional education in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis from 1967-1971. Concurrent with his degree program, he worked as a test engineer-in-training at the General Motors Proving Grounds near Detroit, Michigan. Although the technical training and experience in the Detroit auto industry were admirable, John observed that there was a lack of concern in conservation and felt that there had to be a better way to use energy and resources and to deal with their environmental impact. This led John to investigate other engineering programs leading to a lifelong interest in interactions between energy use, environment, and the concept of sustainability.
Through research and recommendations, John was introduced to and joined an existing wind energy research project at Montana State University, where he completed the requirements for his Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering in 1973. He then continued into a Master’s program producing a thesis titled “Wind-Electric Power Generation in Montana”. John’s Master’s thesis became widely used in the state of Montana as a guide to future energy policy decision making. He completed his Master’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Montana State University in 1975.
From 1976 to 1979, John took a position in a building design and consulting firm in Great Falls, Montana, where he applied his energy related background. Work experience included building energy audits for major industrial and commercial clients, energy saving retrofit designs, solar heating designs, wind resource assessment, and installation of a small wind turbine. Wind resource studies included tower and instrument installation, data retrieval, and data quality management. Work performed with some multi-building projects was also used to guide policy decisions for the State of Montana.
In 1979, John was offered and accepted a job as “Wind Energy Specialist” working for the Governor’s Office (Jerry Brown) in the State of California. In this position, he provided policy advice to the Governor, coordinated work between state agencies, managed installation of moderate size wind turbines as demonstration projects, and coauthored and published a book on small wind energy applications. The Brown administration developed the legal and administrative groundwork for the concept of “wind farms” in California.
In 1981, John started Otech Engineering, a consulting engineering company specializing in wind energy resource assessment, data collection and analysis, and related consultation services. As founder and owner of Otech Engineering, John hired and supervised professional engineers and meteorologists. Services included meteorological tower installation, equipment maintenance, sensor replacement, data retrieval, data analysis and quality review, and wind energy production estimates. Consultant reports were provided for wind energy project developers, banks, government agencies, and many others. Data management agreements typically maintained average data recovery rates in excess of 95%.
From 1985 to 1990, Otech Engineering managed a collaborative group of companies to design, install, and operate wind farm monitoring systems trademarked as “WindNet”. These projects gave Otech personnel access to wind turbine operational performance along with the meteorological data. Direct comparisons of estimated energy production with actual production were performed with this information for hundreds of wind turbines on various projects.
In the late 1990’s, John worked more closely with customers regarding data quality issues, particularly in sensor performance and calibration. He participated in a project funded by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) which was aimed to resolve a measurement problem regarding the accuracy of a commonly used anemometer. This NREL project appointed an independent expert from the Meteorological Standards Institute (MSI) who initiated an inter-laboratory comparison study, commonly known as the Round Robin Experiment, using a common reference standard instrument. As a final outcome, the NREL project succeeded in achieving a consensus agreement regarding the sensor calibration values and measurement uncertainty.
