Brilliant Energy Inventor Began With a Drug Smuggling Submersible

Prison Gave Herb Williams Plenty of Time To Think. Then Riches Came His Way

Peter Swanson Apr 22

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Earlier this month, Juan Carlos Castro Vasquez of Colombia was sentenced to 20 years in a U.S. federal prison. “Juanca,” as he liked to be called, was a boatbuilder for a drug cartel, having overseen the construction of at least five semi-submersibles designed to deliver cocaine for American buyers. That’s one of Castro’s creations in the photo above.

Authorities say there are more than a hundred such craft in service at any given time nowadays. Not so in the late 1980s. Back then, the smugglers preferred “Miami Vice” go-fast boats. Not until around 2006 did “narco subs” enter the picture.

But there was one guy—from Florida, of course—who would provide today’s generation of South American sub-builders with proof of concept. His name is Herbert Williams, and he is extraordinarily clever. By the time he had retired, Williams had become a wealthy man and a legend in the world of alternative energy. He has 22 patents, not counting any that may have been kept off the books for reasons of national security.

Williams always attributed his success to the 4 1/2 years that he spent in federal prison, where another inmate taught him technical drawing. When he got out, he had a roomful of plans for a variety of inventions, including a re-imagined cruise ship.

In 1987, he had launched an honest-to-gosh, semi-submersible, Detroit Diesel powered, wave-piercing beauty built in the woods of North Central Florida. At seatrial, her 8V-71 Detroit propelled Lady Jessica (after Williams’ young daughter) through the water at more than 30 knots, faster than a Coast Guard cutter at wide-open throttle.

“It was beautiful…something from Star Wars,” Williams once told a writer for Bloomberg.

Alas, police were waiting when he returned to port. They pounced as the 40-footer was clearing the jetties. Both Williams and Lady Jessica were taken into federal custody.

Years Later

Boris Kirolof is a naval architect working in Green Cove Springs, Florida. Williams walked into Kirolof’s office one day and became a client. As they worked together on a floating wind-turbine project, Williams confided in Kirolof, telling him his life story.

According to a published report, Williams was born in 1943 in Pahokee on the shores of Lake Okechobee. He spent the first 20 years of his working life as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, probably influenced by his dad. Williams told Kirilof that his father had built fishing boats somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

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It was a good thing that Kirolof was interviewed because his account provided a reality check for some of the fantastical claims in the Bloomberg article. For example, Bloomberg’s reporter wrote that the vessel had been a 96-foot catamaran, which would have made it difficult to trailer to the sea, as it would be both too long and way too wide.

Besides, Williams had shown Kirilof a photograph of Lady Jessica, and his keen naval architect eye can surely be trusted to distinguish between a monohull and a cat.

Recalling his client’s storytelling, Kirilof said Williams was first approached by a Spaniard who found him in a bar and appealed to his sense of the outlandish. A deal was made. Those were the days before supermarkets had switched to plastic, and Williams got paid with paper bags from Publix packed with hundred-dollar bills.

That and the stealth design criteria made it difficult for Williams to maintain the fiction that he was unaware of what the boat was going to be used for. The prosecutors didn’t buy it. As he explained his deniability defense to the Bloomberg writer, Williams recounted his rationale, “I’m building a boat. Chevrolet doesn’t ask customers what they intend to do with its cars.”

Becoming an Inventor

Several of William’s patents involved the concept of a rim-drive turbine which eliminated the need for a central shaft, keeping the center of mechanism open like the hole in a donut. Bloomberg takes up the story:

Prison was horrible, of course. But it also turned Williams into a full-time inventor. “Prison set me down, allowing me to stop and think,” he says. Williams’s brainstorms eventually produced a design for one of the first commercial-scale turbines meant to convert tidal energy to electricity. Irish company OpenHydro later bought the patents Williams secured for his design and used them to create the first and still-biggest source of tidal power sold to consumers through the U.K. grid. In 2015, OpenHydro was sold for $173 million to DCNS Group, a French military contractor. The parent company is deploying massive 300-ton, 52-foot-high versions of the Williams design in Canada’s Bay of Fundy as well as in Brittany, France.

Kirilof recalled visiting William’s office and being shown a room full of the designs that he had put to paper while incarcerated. The rim-drive turbine was brilliant because the rotor wheel floated inside a “ducting shroud,” aligned by the placement of magnets inside the shroud assembly. OpenHydro paid him several million dollars for the patents and put him on its board of directors.

When a news media outlet revealed that Williams was a felon, he was forced to resign from the board. OpenHydro dusted off Williams old plea of ignorance: He didn’t know the boat was going to be a narco-sub:

Herbert was unaware of the vessel’s purpose at the time of taking the commission, and it was impounded by U.S. authorities prior to ever being used. Herbert pleaded guilty to conspiracy and received a custodial sentence.

Eventually, tidal turbine projects in France, Scotland and Nova Scotia came to an end after break-downs and corporate money problems, but by then one had pumped power into the Orkney electricity grid steadily from 2008 to 2024.

Uncle Sam Comes A’Calling

At some point, the U.S. Navy came knocking at Williams’ door. Despite access to engineering talent from MIT and NASA, the Navy needed help from an ex-con with a talent for tinkering. The relationship began when Navy team flew down in a King Air and landed at the airstrip at William’s R&D facility in the woods.

With a newly minted security clearance, Bert Williams went to Washington and worked with the Navy to help solve its open-center turbine challenges. Mainly he sorted a problem that its scientists were having with magnet alignment. This is where, according to Kirilof, more millions of dollars and perhaps an unrecorded patent changed hands.

As it happens, the U.S. government can keep ideas secret under the Invention Secrecy Act. Why would anyone want to keep a shaftless turbine secret? Kirilof noted that a floating turbine creates no friction and therefore can be very quiet, a quality highly valued by the Navy’s “Silent Service.”

Maybe this time Williams really didn’t know to what purpose his talents were being applied, but he told Kirilof that whatever they were making had been tested in Scotland. The U.S. Navy has had an off-and-on submarine presence in Scotland for decades. And, after all, what is a turbine but a type of propeller?

According to Kirilof, one of the best things about Williams’ relationship with the Navy was access to experimental data from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, especially if applicable to the other projects back in Florida.

Liquid Air

Which brings us to the reason that Williams needed help from a naval architect—his last major initiative before his retirement involved another cutting-edge energy concept—liquid air.

When air is compressed 700 times more than the normal stuff we breathe, it becomes liquid, storing the energy that got it to that state. Liquid air can be used like fuel to generate electricity. Like liquified natural gas (LNG), liquid air must be stored in special tanks to keep it supercold. In the case of liquid air, stored cryogenically at -321°F.

Liquid air hasn’t become a useful fuel because of the energy needed to power a compressor. Talking to a reporter in 2014, Williams said that using fossil fuels to liquify air produced “no winner.” He had a better idea.

Working from an industrial lot on the St. Johns River in Palatka, Florida, Williams set about to test a theory about how to liquify air using wind turbines. He called his company Keuka Wind.

With Kirilof and a cryogenic expert as advisers, Keuka Wind built a V-shaped barge that would act as a platform for five wind turbines. The turbines powered compressors and filled storage tank incorporated into the hulls with liquid air from the compressors.

According to Kirilof, the test barge they built was a success. Floating on the St. Johns River, free wind energy filled the barge’s tanks with liquified air, which researchers say is a better long-term energy storage solution than lithium batteries.

Williams’s plan called for full-scale Keuka Wind platforms, each with a pair of 100-foot-diameter wind turbines, would be stationed in the ocean. There would be a pier between the legs of the V-shaped to allow tankers to come alongside and top off from seven 600-foot cryogenic tanks. Each of the two legs of the V would be 2,400 feet long.

Using ships would be a solution to another perceived drawback—how to transport large quantities of liquid air from their source to the energy grid.

Last of the Small Inventors

Back in 2020, the Palatka Daily News reported that Keuka Wind was soliciting investors to build a full-scale wind barge with a $64 million matching grant from the U.S. Energy Department. “As far as we know, and as far as the Department of Energy knows, we’re the only company on the planet that has actually come up with a way to store wind energy on a global scale,” Williams told the reporter, Wayne Smith.

“It’s too big a project for me to do on my own,” he said. “Every day, we’re plugging away and contacting people. We’ve got to get the wind machine out in the ocean and show what it can do.”

Williams is 81 now, and no longer active in business, but his ideas continue to rebound in alternative energy circles and scientific research.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s genius farm, is working on a magnetohydrodynamic drive (MHD) system that would propel ships without using a conventional prop. Powerful magnets would act like an invisible jet to push a vessel through water.

According to DARPA itself, the technology “builds on research stretching back to the 1960’s, when academic, commercial and military researchers thought technology for propulsion at sea could use magnetic fields to enable high-efficiency pumps to replace a propeller and drive shaft.”

It sounds like the old guy was playing in this ballpark. Not bad for a Florida boatbuilder and ex-con with no formal training as an engineer.

Rob Hovsapian was a research faculty member at Florida State University when he first met Williams in 2004. Hovsapian worked with Williams again when the former was a research advisor to the DOE’s National Renewal Energy Laboratory. He described Williams as a disappearing archetype.

“Herb is a very humble guy who doesn’t speak much on his accomplishments,” Hovsapian told the Daily News. “He’s a visionary guy, a man of science. We have very few small inventors left, and Herb is one of those guys.”

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