Early DOE Funded Wind Start-Up Nordic Windpower Lands VC Funding

January 11th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

Berkeley based Nordic Windpower has just moved from being one of the DOE-supported renewable energy start-ups – to getting its own VC funding. The Department of Energy support (funded under the Recovery Act) was intended to bridge the gap as Venture Capital lost its nerve during the recent financial crisis. This bet seems to have paid off.

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According to an SEC filing Nordic Windpower just received $12 million in VC funding for expanding US production of its unique two-bladed design for smaller, lighter 1 MW turbines intended for community wind farms for schools, municipalities and tribal groups.

In July Nordic Windpower had been among the first companies to receive a conditional commitment for a $16 million loan guarantee offer from the US Department of Energy (DOE), supported through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The proviso was that in order to receive the funding, it must also find a private investor and hit certain milestones to get the money. Today that private investor stepped up to the plate with $12 million of an anticipated $30.15 million round of equity, according to a filing with the SEC. And the milestones?

In September Nordic Windpower was included in the Global Cleantech 100 Award from among 3,500 companies nominated for inclusion by the leading research, events and advisory services for the cleantech industry. Tom Carbone, Nordic Windpower CEO was invited to be one of the speakers at the Cleantech XXIII Forum.

And this month it shipped its first turbines (PDF) from their new Idaho factory, headed for Uruguay. So it hit the milestones it had to and so the Department of Education funding will now kick in.

Nordic has now raised more than $28 million. It is backed by Khosla Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Novus Energy Partners, Goldman Sachs, Impax Asset Management, Pulsar Energy Capital, and I2BF Venture Capital.

Image: Nordic Windpower

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Tags: DOE funding, Nordic Windpower, VC funding

About the Author

Susan Kraemer writes at CleanTechnica, CSP-Today, PV-Insider , SmartGridUpdate, and GreenProphet. She has also been published at Ecoseed, NRDC OnEarth, MatterNetwork, Celsius, EnergyNow, and Scientific American. As a former serial entrepreneur in product design, Susan brings an innovator's perspective on inventing a carbon-constrained civilization: If necessity is the mother of invention, solving climate change is the mother of all necessities! As a lover of history and sci-fi, she enjoys chronicling the strange future we are creating in these interesting times. Follow Susan on Twitter @dotcommodity.

Lars Mach

Wow! It costs a tiny fraction of these investments to design, build and certify a modern wind turbine from scratch! All that the “start up” has done was to buy the rights on a 13-year old Swedish turbine technology that was laid off in Europe. Two-bladed machines are no longer eligible for permits in Europe due to acoustic and visual noise.
It is amazing how marketing can present such outdated technology from Europe as an innovation at all… In Europe – where wind energy has experienced incredible support through funding and feed-in tariffs – that machine had been no success at all.