Walk into a public meeting space at random this summer and you are likely to find Paul Pimentel evangelizing the good news of Vineyard Power. As the public face of the Island’s fledgling energy cooperative, Mr. Pimentel has waged a tireless campaign to recruit new members, barnstorming road and homeowners associations, private residences, coffee shops and beyond.

“I’ll go anywhere and talk to anyone,” he said after wrapping up another community forum in the Old Whaling Church on Wednesday night this week. He believes he has given his presentation over 20 times but he never tires of it, particularly the chance to interact with the audience afterwards.

“The question and answer session is where I get my kicks,” he said.

For an engineer Mr. Pimentel is unusually adept at speaking to a lay audience. His speaking style is a cogent mix of good-humored bluntness and a technical mastery of almost any wind-related subject; he is as comfortable explaining Vineyard Power’s elaborate financial plan as he is discussing the finer points of turbine operation — or bird kills, rogue waves or prehistoric burial grounds for that matter.

“I was one of six engineering graduates in my class at Harvard,” he said, “The rest of them went to business school and are making millions and I’m still tinkering.”

Vineyard Power’s goal is to recruit 2,000 members by the end of the year. With memberships at $100 and scheduled to increase by $50 every six months they currently have 770 members. Memberships are a crucial component of the overall viability of the project, which aims to install 17 wind turbines off Vineyard shores by 2016, eventually stabilizing and hopefully reducing energy prices Islandwide. The credibility of the project is dependent on the support of the community — and financial backers, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which would potentially foot half of the project’s $180 million price tag with a rural utilities loan, are waiting to see if Vineyarders support the idea of a cooperative before investing what at first would be high-risk capital. It’s why on a given day Vineyard Power’s small staff can be seen anywhere from Cronig’s in West Tisbury to Morning Glory Farm and Stop and Shop in Edgartown, doggedly enlisting seasonal and year-round residents alike.

Mr. Pimentel says confusion about Cape Wind inevitably crops up whenever he makes his pitch. Cape Wind, as a private for-profit commercial enterprise, would not produce electricity directly for the Cape and Islands, as many unfamiliar with the local energy landscape assume, but instead would sell it back to National Grid for distribution across New England.

“The confusion is a big enough issue to be pretty concerning,” he said. “For the uninitiated, it’s an immediate problem. People will immediately make a connection between Cape Wind and us, and extend generalities to Vineyard Power.”

“There’s a new world coming,” Mr. Pimentel says. — Mark Alan Lovewell

When he is not busy recruiting prospective Vineyard Power members, Mr. Pimentel passes his time as the senior vice president of engineering for the energy engineering firm Noresco, where he has overseen a wind turbine project in Guantanamo Bay, a solar array in San Diego that was at one point the largest in the country and countless other renewable energy projects.

“I have this expertise, I can do this stuff, I know how to do it, I can give this back to the Island,” he said. Mr. Pimentel has been visiting Martha’s Vineyard since the 1960s with his wife, Sandra, with whom he fell in love at age 13. They moved to the Island permanently in 2003.

“I have loved this place for as long as I can remember,” he said. “That’s what motivates me.”

Although Vineyard Power has taken pains not to exploit the tragedy in the Gulf, the lesson it evinced about the future of American energy production was not lost on Mr. Pimentel, who couldn’t help but express dismay at the disaster.

“It’s just plain ghastly,” he said. “In and of itself it’s not an unreasonable occurrence, though, when you think about the number of wells there are. Frankly, I think the companies do a pretty good job of maintaining safety and this just happened to be one of those rare cases when several things went wrong at the same time. That’s the way to think about this: it happens. There will be another one.”

On a recent stormy night inside the Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs Mr. Pimentel was once again selling Vineyard Power to anyone who would listen. A lone prospective recruit sat in attendance to hear his pitch. Unflagged, Mr. Pimentel engaged the audience member with the same level of enthusiasm and relish he brings to every forum.

“There’s a new world coming,” he declared. “The era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. I’m just trying to build a ramp to get there.”