Vestas & Masdar Launch “Wind For Prosperity”

Masdar and Vestas have just launches “Wind For Prosperity.” This is a commercially based business model aimed at providing affordable, reliable electricity to rural areas that currently lack such electricity.

According to Vestas, Wind For Prosperity:

“Creates an opportunity for business, government, and financial institutions to combine their talents to improve people’s lives and generate risk-adjusted returns for private investors.”

“Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, strongly shares the vision behind Wind for Prosperity and will focus on managing the development and construction of Wind for Prosperity projects; while Vestas will focus on wind-mapping, site design, and sourcing and refurbishing wind turbines.

“Many of the world’s most underserved citizens rely primarily on diesel generators for what power they have, which is expensive and polluting. Wind for Prosperity uses Vestas’ unique weather data processing capabilities to identify energy-poor but wind-rich areas where Vestas’ wind hybrid solutions can power social and economic growth,” says Morten Albæk, Vestas Group Senior Vice President and CMO.

Implementing energy sources that can operate independently without consuming costly resources that have to be imported tends to provide long-term economic benefits. If a rural community was provided with a gasoline-fueled generator, even if the generator was free, there is no net flow of money into their local economy. Instead, there is a net flow of money out of their economy as they have to continuously purchase imported gasoline.

People often make the argument that the US was built on oil, as if that is a reason to continue using it. The US economy wasn’t built using expensive oil — it was cheap in those days. Now it is so expensive that it is just slowing the economy down.