S. David Freeman

Simon David Freeman His parents were Lithuanian Jewish and Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States via Ellis Island. Freeman received a degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1948.

Career Freeman was appointed to energy committees by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 and worked in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the presidency of Richard Nixon. He counseled the Senate Commerce Committee with regards to fuel-efficiency standards and supervised the 1974 report by the Ford Foundation titled 'A Time to Choose'. He also headed other major energy organizations, including the New York Power Authority and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP); he was in charge of the latter from 1997 to 2001.

SMUD Freeman has been termed an "eco-pioneer" for his environmentally-oriented leadership of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). Freeman became general manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in 1990. He has said that SMUD was an embarrassment at that time, and the district was "reeling from two decades of rate hikes, construction cost overruns, operating failures, equipment outages, worker injuries, poor morale and management scandals". Freeman left SMUD in 1994.

According to Freeman, since opening in 1971, Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station had "suffered dozens of emergencies, shutdowns, releases of radioactive material and accidents".

To fill the energy resource hole left by the closure of Rancho Seco, Freeman embarked immediately in 1990 on one of the most aggressive energy efficiency programs of any utility at the time and in 1991 hired Donald Osborn, then Director of the University of Arizona Solar & Energy Research Facility, to develop and implement a likewise aggressive solar energy program. Under Freeman's leadership the SMUD PV Pioneer Program began the broad and sustained commercialization of grid-connected, distributed (so-called "rooftop") solar that by 2002 had half of all the grid connected photovoltaic (PV) power of the entire country. The PV Pioneer Program led directly to the California Million Solar Roofs Program and the California Solar Initiative that was responsible for today's thriving and rapidly-growing American solar market.

Death Freeman died on May 12, 2020, at a hospital in Reston, Virginia, after having a heart attack. He was 94.

Books Freeman has authored several books, including Energy: The New Era (1974), Winning Our Energy Independence (2007), An All-Electric America: A Climate Solution and the Hopeful Future (2016) and an autobiography, The Green Cowboy: An Energetic Life (2016). Other books that contain his works include Oral history of the Tennessee Valley Authority: Interview with S. David Freeman, March 30, 1984 and Speeches by S. David Freeman (1997).

In Winning Our Energy Independence, he wrote that there is the renewable energy needed to wean society from the Three Poisons: foreign oil, dirty coal, and dangerous nuclear power.