The drive from Houlton to Portland takes about four and a half hours if you don’t stop. Yehuda Gittelson made it in closer to six, because he pulled over twice. Once at a gas station in Lincoln to fill the Subaru and buy coffee. Once at a rest area south of Bangor where he sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes, not because he was tired but because he was trying to figure out whether he was making the right decision.
He’d spent two years in Aroostook County. The work had ended. The grant that funded his position with a wind farm development company had run its cycle, and the projects his team was feeding data into hadn’t advanced. Northern Maine’s transmission problem, the same bottleneck that had stalled wind development for years before he arrived, was still unsolved. There was no job to stay for.
“It wasn’t a dramatic exit,” he said. “I loaded the car and drove south. That was it.”
The second episode of On The Roof, his renewable energy podcast, spends a long stretch on this transition. Yehuda Gittelson recorded the episode solo, without a guest, and the section about leaving Aroostook County is the most candid part. He doesn’t frame the move as a pivot or a career upgrade. He frames it as the result of a math problem. Portland had work. The County didn’t.
What He Left Behind
Gittelson’s job in Aroostook County had been site assessment for potential wind installations. Driving logging roads to remote ridgelines. Setting up anemometers. Downloading data weeks later. Mapping terrain and wind patterns for projects that might or might not get built. The solitude was genuine. Cell service was sparse. The nearest coworker might be forty miles away on a different ridge.
What the job gave him, besides two years of field experience in renewable energy, was a way of reading physical environments. Topography, elevation, microclimate patterns, the way a ridge that looked promising on a satellite image might behave differently once you measured the actual wind speeds at hub height. He learned that having a strong natural resource means very little if you can’t move the electricity it produces to the people who need it.
Northern Maine has some of the strongest onshore wind potential in New England. The region also lacks a direct connection to the ISO New England power grid. Electricity generated in Aroostook County has to travel through Canada before it can reach southern markets, and the cost of that detour has killed or stalled every major wind proposal for more than a decade. The King Pine project, a 1,000-megawatt development that would be the largest onshore wind farm east of the Mississippi, is the latest attempt. Whether it succeeds depends on whether a new transmission line gets built from The County to a substation more than 100 miles to the south.
Yehuda Gittelson was long gone by the time King Pine entered the planning stage. But the pattern was already familiar.
What Portland Offered
The solar market in southern Maine was growing when Gittelson arrived. Federal tax credits were making residential installations more affordable. The state’s clean energy targets were generating demand for qualified installers. He applied to Solaris Energy Solutions, and his engineering degree, paired with wind energy field experience, made him an unusual hire for a crew where most people had come through electrical apprenticeships or construction.
He got the job and spent his first year learning a trade that his previous experience had only partially prepared him for. The analytical skills carried over. Knowing how to flash a roof penetration did not. Neither did running conduit nor sizing an inverter for a specific load profile.
The senior installers on his crew taught him. Gittelson was willing to carry equipment and ask questions, which is apparently the combination that earns patience from experienced tradespeople.
“I had a degree and two years of field work, and I still didn’t know how to do the job,” he said. “That’s not a criticism of my education. It’s just the truth about what hands-on work requires.”
The Same Skill, Different Roof
The thread Yehuda Gittelson pulls on in the episode, and the one that seems to interest him most, is the continuity between his two careers. Wind site assessment and solar installation are distinct disciplines with different tools, scales, and technical requirements. But both start with the same fundamental task. You look at a physical site and figure out how to deploy an energy system that works within the constraints it presents.
A ridgeline in Aroostook County has constraints. Elevation, access roads, turbulence patterns, and proximity to transmission. A rooftop in Cape Elizabeth has constraints, too. Pitch, orientation, shading, rafter condition, electrical panel capacity, and local code requirements. The thinking process, Gittelson argues, is more similar than the two jobs appear from the outside.
He doesn’t oversell the parallel. He’s clear that solar installation required skills he didn’t have and had to learn through repetition and mentorship. But the analytical framework, the habit of reading a site before you touch it, carried over. And the NABCEP certification he earned after his first year in solar formalized that framework in a way that made the connection explicit.
The drive took six hours. The career change took about a year. Neither was planned, and Gittelson seems genuinely comfortable with that. Some people map out a trajectory and follow it. He followed the work, and the work happened to take him somewhere worth staying.