Most conversations about renewable energy start with policy numbers or cost projections. Yehuda Gittelson wanted to start with something else. The second episode of his podcast, On The Roof, opens with a detail that has nothing to do with solar panels or wind turbines. It opens with his parents taking him to the transfer station in Bangor and quizzing him about where things go after you throw them away.
The episode is called “From Wind to Wire,” and it’s the first time Gittelson has told the full version of how he ended up in the clean energy industry. He’s mentioned pieces of it before, in passing, during interviews with guests on earlier episodes. A reference to Aroostook County here. A mention of UMaine there. But he’d never laid the whole thing out in sequence, from childhood through college through his first job and into the work he does now.
“I kept telling other people’s stories,” he said. “At some point, I realized I was avoiding my own.”
The avoidance wasn’t dramatic. It was practical. Yehuda Gittelson hosts On The Roof as an interview show, and interview hosts tend to stay behind the questions rather than in front of them. The format doesn’t naturally lend itself to autobiography. But listeners had been asking. Where did you come from? How did you get into this? What were you doing before Portland?
Episode 2 answers those questions in a way that feels less like a prepared pitch and more like someone thinking out loud for 45 minutes.
Bangor to Orono
Gittelson grew up in Bangor, the son of a Jewish father and a mother of mixed European descent. Neither parent worked in energy. What they shared was an attention to waste, to systems, to the question of where things end up. He describes this not as an environmental ideology but as a household habit. Composting before it was not common before. Driving to the dump and making it educational.
He went to the University of Maine at Orono for mechanical engineering. The program is ABET-accredited and has a strong track record in job placement. Gittelson gravitated toward courses on energy systems, thermal applications, and efficiency. The department’s connection to offshore wind research, particularly through the Advanced Structures and Composites Center, created an atmosphere on campus where renewable energy felt like an active field rather than an abstract one.
He graduated with 123 credits and a decision. Most of his classmates left the state. Yehuda Gittelson wanted to stay in Maine, which meant the options were limited.
Two Years on the Ridgeline
The job he found was in Aroostook County, doing site assessments for a wind farm development company. The County covers more square miles than Connecticut and Rhode Island put together, with a population of roughly 67,000 people scattered across it. The wind is relentless. The distances between towns are long. The winter tests equipment and patience equally.
The work involved driving to remote ridgelines, installing weather monitoring equipment, collecting data, and returning weeks later to retrieve it. He was often the only person at the site.
The central problem that has shaped the region’s energy potential for two decades was already visible when Gittelson arrived. Northern Maine lacks a direct connection to the New England power grid. Electricity generated there has to be routed through New Brunswick, Canada, before reaching markets to the south. That bottleneck has stalled or killed multiple wind projects over the years.
He watched it happen in real time. The company he worked for was doing early-stage feasibility studies for developments that depended on transmission lines that hadn’t been built and financing that hadn’t materialized. When his grant-funded position ended, there was no clear next step in The County.
“I didn’t leave because I was done with wind,” he said. “I left because the work stopped.”
Portland and the Roof
He moved to Portland because a friend had a room available in East Bayside and because Portland had jobs. He applied to Solaris Energy Solutions and was hired as a junior installer despite an unusual resume. Mechanical engineering degree. Two years of wind site assessment. Zero experience bolting panels to a roof.
The first year was physical and specific. Rafter spacing. Flashing details. Conduit runs. Torque specs. He learned from the senior crew members who had come up through electrical and construction backgrounds. The theoretical knowledge from his degree was useful but not sufficient. The field demanded a different kind of fluency.
After a year, he began working toward his NABCEP certification, the PV Installation Professional credential that serves as the industry’s benchmark for solar installers. The process requires classroom training, verified project experience in a hands-on decision-making role, and a timed exam that covers system design, electrical theory, code compliance, and safety. Yehuda Gittelson describes the certification as the thing that connected his academic understanding of energy systems to the practical knowledge he’d been accumulating on rooftops across southern Maine.
Why He Told It Now
The timing of the episode is partly logistical. On The Roof is a young podcast, still in its first season, and Gittelson felt that the audience, small as it is, deserved to know who was asking the questions before he brought on more guests. Partly it was personal. He wanted to articulate something he’d been thinking about but hadn’t put into words.
“The clean energy workforce doesn’t get built through planning,” he said in the episode. “It gets built one person at a time, each one figuring out how to connect their skills to whatever shows up next.”
That framing runs through the whole 45 minutes. Gittelson’s path from Bangor to Orono to Aroostook County to Portland wasn’t a career plan. It was a series of responses to what existed. The wind job existed, so he took it. The solar job existed, so he took that. The podcast existed because he made it exist, which is maybe the first purely voluntary thing on the list.
The episode ends where it started, with Gittelson in his East Bayside loft, recording into a USB microphone, telling a story he’d been carrying around without ever quite putting it down.