Posts Tagged by large renewables projects
Financing Large Renewables Projects
| February 22, 2010 | Posted by Craig Shields under Renewables - Business |
I was on a conference call this morning with people in Los Angeles, New York, Dublin, London, and Istanbul, trying to raise money for a large run-of-river hydrokinetics project in Turkey. I’d have to go back a long way to recall a conversation representing that many time zones.
What I find noteworthy here are two things:
1) Sadly, most of the really important renewables projects are happening outside the US. I’m reminded of this constantly – normally accompanied by a warning that the US really cannot afford to take a backseat in terms of the development and implementation of alternatives to fossil fuels. We’ve done a good job in information and communication technologies, with companies like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, etc., but we need to be equally aggressive – and ultimately successful — in leading the way to clean energy.
Renewable energy legend Bill Paul, who has joined us here at 2GreenEnergy as a financial writer, points out the importance of the European, Asian — even African markets virtually every time we speak. Bill keeps his finger on the pulse of 75 different sources of information every single day — many of which feature projects in some fairly exotic places. When we first met over lunch, he mentioned that it’s likely the Sahara will soon be the site of enormous amounts of solar thermal, providing power for much of Europe, and that this heightens the importance of following the stock exchanges in Tripoli and Algiers. Wow – that’s a lot of information to juggle.
2) The financial mechanics behind deals of this size (the project we discussed this morning is 109 million Euros) are incredibly complicated. I was so lost on this call I didn’t know which end was up. Fortunately, I was able to introduce the parties, mute the phone, sip my coffee, and listen quietly until it was time to thank everyone for participating and hang up. I’m blessed to be associated with people 10 times better at the financial side of this than I’ll ever be.
Calls like this remind me of the first video I made when we started this site, where I asked: “What’s causing the rapid migration to renewables? It’s business. The world is figuring out that there are enormous profits to be realized from pushing toward clean energy.”
