Richard F. Hirsh
Richard Hirsh is a professor of History of Technology and Science & Technology Studies at Virginia Tech. His academic background is rather unusual, having pursued both science and history in college and graduate school. While he has an undergraduate degree in American history, he picked up a Master's degree in Physics and a Ph.D. in History of Science from the University of Wisconsin. Along the way, he worked for two summers as a historian for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Richard became interested in the electric utility industry in 1980 after being appointed chairman of a citizen's committee whose job was to create a new rate structure for the Gainesville (Florida) Regional Utilities System. The System had just finished building a new power plant, and now it had to raise rates to pay for it! Working with environmentalists, members of the business community, and others, he won consensus over a structure that discouraged wasteful consumption and which experimented with time-of-day rates–a rather severe break with the utility's traditional growth-oriented policies. He left town two days after the City Commission accepted the new rate structure–thus avoiding the "heat" that was sure to come–to take a job at Virginia Tech.
Though previously writing about astronomy performed from outer space, Richard had been bitten by the electricity bug and chose to pursue new research on the recent history of the utility system. In 1989, he published Technology and Transformation in the American Electric Utility Industry (Cambridge University Press), a book that describes the technological, managerial, and cultural reasons for the industry's problems of the 1970s. He has also worked as a consultant for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, co-authoring a management history on the utility's "ACT-squared" energy-efficiency R&D project. Having finished his new book Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System (MIT Press, 1999) dealing with the utility system's further transformation since the 1970s, he still finds the industry as interesting as when he was introduced to it 20 years ago.