concepts · updated 2026-08-01
Keith Haggard
confidence: high volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-01fresh
Keith Haggard — New Mexico passive solar designer and organizer; principal founder (1972) and first executive director of the New Mexico Solar Energy Association, co-founded with Peter van Dresser and Steve Baer at Ghost Ranch. Sat on the Sun-dwellings design team from 1973. A distinct person from Kenneth 'Ken' Haggard of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Keith Haggard is the New Mexico passive solar designer and organizer who co-founded the New Mexico Solar Energy Association (NMSEA) at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu in 1972 with Peter van Dresser and Steve Baer, and served as its first executive director. The ASES regional history by Bruce D. Hunn calls him “the principal founder.”
NMSEA founding and leadership
At the 1972 founding, the three co-founders hosted the first “Life Technic” conference at Ghost Ranch with over 50 members; the proceedings became NMSEA’s first official publication. A contemporaneous July 1977 High Country News item identifies “Keith Haggard, the founder and executive director of the New Mexico Solar Energy Association” — period print evidence of both the name and the role while he held it. He served as executive director through NMSEA’s Sun-dwellings era.
Sun-dwellings design team (1973–1976)
Haggard sat on the Sun-dwellings design team headed by van Dresser, which began meeting in Santa Fe in 1973 — alongside William Lumpkins, David Wright, Francis Wessling, Steve Baer, Benjamin “Buck” Rogers, Mark Chalom, and Aubrey Owen. The team designed four two-bedroom passive-solar dormitory test units at Ghost Ranch (lean-to greenhouse, Trombe wall, direct gain, and a control), built from summer 1976 under Quentin Wilson and Mark Chalom; the best performer supplied 78% of its needed heat versus 18% for the control.
Not Ken Haggard
Keith Haggard is a different person from Kenneth “Ken” L. Haggard, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo architecture professor and Atascadero Skytherm researcher. During 1972–1975, when Keith was founding and running NMSEA in New Mexico, Ken Haggard was a full-time Cal Poly faculty member serving as Principal Investigator on the HUD-funded roof-pond research in California; Ken’s documented biography contains no New Mexico, NMSEA, Ghost Ranch, Baer, or van Dresser connection. Earlier passes of this knowledge base “corrected” the Corrales Comment obituary’s “Keith Haggard” to Ken — the obituary was right, and the correction was a conflation error (one that AI-generated search summaries also make). No standalone biography of Keith Haggard has been located; his record is attested through NMSEA-related sources.
See also
- New Mexico Solar Energy Association
- Steve Baer
- Peter Van Dresser
- Ken Haggard — the distinct Cal Poly architect this figure was long conflated with
- Mark Chalom — fellow Sun-dwellings design-team member
- David Wright — co-founded Sun Mountain Design (1972)
- William Lumpkins — co-founded Sun Mountain Design (1972)
- Life Technic conference (1972) — the NMSEA founding conference Haggard co-hosted at Ghost Ranch
- Ghost Ranch — Abiquiu site of the NMSEA founding and the Sun-dwellings test units