Daily Kos to Build a Wind Farm?
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 07.18.05
The popular political blog Daily Kos allows its readers to write comments – like us – but also "diaries" that can be read by everybody. Blogs within a blog, more or less. This has led to the creation of a fairly strong community that often goes off on unexpected digressions from the main subject matter of the blog. The latest was pointed out to us by Dave Roberts of Grist: A Daily Kos reader called Jerome wrote a diary about a potential wind farm or wind turbine financed by the Daily Kos audience, and the community reacted enthusiastically (over 200 comments, almost all positive). It would be a for-profit endeavor, but also "a great symbol for the site, as well as a very concrete reply to people that ask us what to actually do to solve problems."
A modern wind turbine, like the 1.5 MW GE model which is the most frequent in North America, or the various 2 MW models from other manufacturers, typically cost 1-1.5 million $/MW. A typical wind farm will consist of 5 to 50 such wind turbines.
Debt financing (what I do) can typically provide 80% of the investment amount. [...]
After much discussion in the comments, and through email too I'm sure, Jerome updated his diary:
So a result of the early feedback is pretty clear - I need volunteers to help me build a team. I thank those that have offered various competences or services and will get in touch with you if I have not yet done so. Those of you that want to be in the loop one way or another please e-mail me. Specific advice on (or ideas on how to find) how to create a fairly small corporate structure with lots of shareholders, about investment (IRA and the like) taxation aspects, and about the Securities issues that have been flagged in the thread would be really helpful at this stage.
Finally, it is also logical that this will not be pursued further on dKos itself, beyond some updates as (and if) this moves along towards something concrete.
Again, thanks for the early support and feedback. With close to 400,000$ of potential interest expressed, it is clear that this is an idea worth pursuing, and I hope to be able to do this with as many of you as possible.
To contact Jerome about the project, you can write to: jeromeguillet (--@--) yahoo.fr (just cut & paste it and remove the characters and spaces around the @).
Community wind farms. What a nice way for the online world to have a positive impact on the real one. I can only hope that some day TreeHugger will be popular enough to do things like that (just think of the possibilities!), even if it is a smaller-scale project. And who says green causes can't make money? A wind farm is a profitable thing if you can get it off the ground; many farmers in Denmark are getting over US$200,000 a year from a single wind turbine built on their property, according to a SRC report that aired earlier this year.
This graph from The Economist is also very telling about what the future might look like:
::Would you invest in a dKos windfarm?
Hey I would like to be in the loop about your wind turbine project. Actually I have been trying to build a generator similar to a wind turbine model for about half a year now and have had little progress. So I would like to help out in any way if possible if in exchange I can learn something about how to contruct / build a generator. This site is great.
This is great! I read Kos and I recall asking Jerome for advice on US wind farm investing many months ago when he began posting diaries on wind/alt energy on a regular basis, so I so happy to see Kossacks making the next step.
Air America's radio show "EcoTalk" introduced me to something you can more easily do to get involved with Green Power - buy yourself "green tags" to offset your Legacy Power pollution. Check it out:
http://krystal-planet.com/files/Pdf/greentags.pdf
I've managed to save up roughly $34355 in my bank account, but I'm not sure if I should buy a house or not. Do you think the market is stable or do you think that home prices will decrease by a lot?