OwnEnergy shoots for $100M to fund wind power

October 9, 2008 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

OwnEnergy just brought in an undisclosed amount in first-round funding, but the 1-year-old wind and alternative energy company is already looking ahead to the full $100 million it needs to raise to develop its first project, a 51-megawatt wind farm in north Texas — and to have it up and running by the end of 2009.

It’s unclear how close the Brooklyn-based company is to this goal, and I haven’t been able to reach OwnEnergy executives yet. But they must be pretty confident, considering that they’ve already started negotiations with a major turbine manufacturer, and broadcasted their intentions to develop between 10 and 80 other wind farms of similar scale.

Clearly, this growth will require significant deals with local landowners. The strategy so far has been to agree to split energy sales revenue should the plants succeed. Landowners have been hungry to cash in on the cleantech boom while the gettings good, and OwnEnergy is along for the ride, forging 12 partnerships with communities and landowning groups across seven states in the last year.

The company’s leaders say communities benefit more from owning small-scale alternative energy plants themselves rather than leasing land to development companies for bigger projects. Chief executive Jacob Susman told VentureWire that the future of the business will be energy generation on a single community, and even home level. Even so, its competitors, like National Wind LLC, are going forward with large-scale plans. The Minneapolis-based company recently announced that it will build a 400 megawatt plant in Colorado.

After OwnEnergy’s wind operations have taken root, the company plans to expand into biomass power production. It has tapped new investor EnerTech Capital Partners and first-round investors Countour Venture Partners and the New York City Investment Fund to keep the ball rolling.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

With GreenBeat 2009, VentureBeat's all-star conference on all things Smart Grid, coming up in November, Camille will be expanding coverage of this exciting space. Stay up to date by following @greenbeat2009 on Twitter or by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook here.

  • This is old Venturebeat news, but OwnEnergy's efforts have just trickled down enough to West Texans to make them a relevant topic conversation. As OE approaches landowners out here who were not on any initial wind farm project, they unfortunately come off as a johnny come lately company hoping to cash in on the green energy wind farm ride. They have a business model that is very far from the traditional oil and gas lease which landowners out here are used to, and from which wind leases were derived. This, combined with the fact that so much money has to be put up front by the landowners raises many eyebrows