Community-Supported Wind

What is Community-Supported Wind?

Community Supported Wind FAQ.PDF

There are many ways to support renewable energy in your community including: putting up your own renewable energy system, buying renewable energy credits from the utility, politically supporting public renewable projects, and joining with others to put together a larger project. Community renewable energy projects are projects large enough to support multiple households and are structured to optimize benefit to the local community. Presented here is a new way to get community renewable energy projects off the ground that is economical, efficient, accessible and effective.

Cascade Community Wind Company is using a model called community-supported wind where a project pre-sells the power (as a percentage of total project output) and the renewable energy credits (also called green tags.) from the turbine for the next 20 years. Puget Sound Energy does not currently allow direct allocation of the electricity to each subscriber’s account (net metering).

We use virtual net metering (VNM) in which PSE pays a project for the power it produces (the big check) and a percentage of each payment (the little check) is then paid by the project to the subscribers utility account (regardless of the utility the subscriber is connected to). The appropriate percentage of renewable energy credits generated by the turbine is also retired on the behalf of the subscriber (making the subscriber the end-user of the renewable energy).

Cascade Community Wind Company is developing wind energy projects supported by and benefiting the local community. Buying Virtual Net Metering Subscriptions to these projects is a great way to make sure they happen.

For more information, to get involved, or to purchase a subscription, go to: www.CascadeCommunityWind.com

Call: 360-306-5331

or email: subscribers@CascadeCommunityWind.com

Community wind has 5 times the economic impact on local value added, and 3.4 times the impact on local job creation, relative to a corporate-owned development.

From “COMMUNITY VS. CORPORATE WIND: DOES IT MATTER WHO DEVELOPS THE WIND IN BIG STONE COUNTY, MN?” By Arne Kildegaard, Ph.D., and Josephine Myers-Kuykindall, both of University of Minnesota, Morris.

“We don’t think of alternative power as something that we just import from other parts of the nation.”

  • Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City