Wind that powers your home

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Solar startups are so 2006.

This year the cutting edge of alternative energy will be selling consumers on a clean technology previously used only at an industrial level: wind power. A dozen U.S. companies are set to offer turbines that can be placed in users' yards to cut their energy bills.

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That's good news for Andy Kruse, founder of Southwest Windpower, based in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Kruse raised $10 million in financing and teamed up with scientists at the National Renewable Energy Lab to create the Skystream 3.7, a sleek 33-foot turbine with 6-foot blades that can work at wind speeds as low as 9 mph (and provide as much as 80 percent of the average household's electricity).

Skystreams cost up to $13,000 a pop, but Kruse shipped 150 of them during the first two months of production. "Everybody in the world has just woken up" to wind power, Kruse says, projecting global revenue of $24 million for 2007. "We had to turn down countless investors."

Right now, startups like Kruse's are targeting wealthy consumers who live on big plots of land - the 13 million Americans with half an acre or more.

But that could change fast in the likely event that the new Congress passes a bipartisan bill providing a tax credit equivalent to 30 percent of the cost of a wind user's turbine. (Some states already offer rebates.) Consumers can also sell their excess power to utilities such as Xcel Energy.

VCs are starting to get excited too.

Peter Edwards, a partner at Altira Group, an investor in Southwest, sees opportunities for dealers, installers, and makers of efficient batteries that can hold excess wind energy for a couple of days. "In the world of the future," he says, "it will be just as easy to buy a wind turbine as an air-conditioning unit."

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