UPDATE: I returned from Chugwater, WY on 5/1/2011 after a very productive meeting with local land owners. We picked up a few more acres while we were there and learned a lot about what land owners are thinking as well as what other companies are doing in the area. After the trip, I am even more confident of the value we have created with our project. More opportunities have appeared that we will pursue in the direction of constructing turbines this decade.
UPDATE: Going to Chugwater, WY on 4/28 to pitch our company to more land owners whose leases are expiring with a competitor. We might be able to grow out footprint by a few potential megawatts.
Another passion of mine is alternative energy. Ultimately every business comes down to energy costs, harvesting, shipping, manufacturing, assembly, and shipping again. Our foreign policy as a nation is heavily influenced by energy supply. So being able to detach ourselves from the crutch that is oil would recreate our society in an incredible way.
The big advancement that is going to make this happen I think will be conventional fusion power. We are still a few decades away from that kind of technology, but I do think it will come. Until then, a spectrum of non oil based forms of energy will emerge and compete for the green space. No one solution will solve our problems. Different alternatives like wind, solar, and hydro will only make economic sense if the resources are right and the energy can be brought to market inexpensively.
For this reason I teamed up with some other interested parties to create a wind energy company. This is one of my long-term projects that may end up taking a decade to bring to fruition. I’ve learned a lot about this business and primarily that utility companies look and plan many years into the future and are slow to change. As such these projects take many years and even decades to complete. At least they do in the United States. Our project is now four years old, and our earliest completion date is probably sometime in 2014.
