Bullish on renewable energy but short the few million to invest in a new solar power plant? Perhaps you have $8
Co. Exist
It can be hard to truly connect with the renewable energy revolution. Just buying wind power from your local utility is very far removed from, say, having your own solar panels, and not very many people are doing solar installations yet. But what if you could own a part of a solar power plant, at prices that almost anyone could afford?
Abundance Generation, a UK company, has turned to crowd funding to finance major renewable generation projects. “We wanted to create productive, tangible and long-term investment opportunities that are open to everyone,” says the company on its website. “Renewable energy is a great place to begin the process of returning control to people over where their money goes and how it is invested.”
We wanted to create productive, tangible and long-term investment opportunities.
Once a project is up and running selling electricity, in part thanks to your money (as little as five British pounds), investors will receive cash payments based on the value of the energy sold by the project. Abundance estimates small-time investors will earn 5.7 to 8 percent of the project’s profits over 25 years. Invests are treated as debt instruments (debentures), rather than equity, skirting the issues that have held up crowd funded VC in other contexts (although the JOBS Act should be changing that soon).
