Colorado Springs officials celebrated the arrival of the city’s first renewable energy company Thursday as the owners of Rocky Wind Power announced plans to open a plant here to make wind-powered streetlights and rooftop wind-power turbines.
Steve Stultz, Rocky Wind’s chief financial officer, said the company will begin hiring 25 employees Monday through the Pikes Peak Workforce Center and hopes to expand to 140 employees within a year. He said unemployed residents would have the first chance at the company’s jobs because they represent “a very motivated work force” that helped attract Rocky Wind to the Springs over cities in several other states.
Rocky Wind was heavily recruited by other cities and states, including New Mexico, where Stultz said Gov. Bill Richardson “was very generous, throwing around money like it was confetti.” The company selected Colorado, despite only modest incentives that include tax credits and job training help totaling $376,000, because “the response from people in Colorado Springs was worth more than what other communities offered,” Stultz said during a press conference at the Antlers Hilton hotel.
Rocky Wind has leased 14,000 square feet of industrial space at 4120 N. Nevada Ave., which it will use both to manufacture the streetlights and turbines and as a showroom to sell them to homeowners, businesses and government agencies. It plans to launch operations by mid-March.
The company is owned by Stultz and his wife, Pam, who also own Prevailing Power LLC, a company in Shenandoah, Iowa, that employs 47 to manufacture towers for small wind turbines used by small businesses, farms and homes in rural areas. Pam Stultz, who is CEO of Rocky Wind, said the couple formed a separate company for the Colorado Springs operation because it will manufacture a much broader line of products targeted at homeowners and business owners.
The rooftop turbines cost about $10,000 for a 1.8-kilowatt system, which can generate enough electricity to power a home that spends about $90 a month on electricity; purchasers are eligible for a 30 percent federal tax credit, Steve Stultz said. The streetlights cost about $5,000 and generate enough power to supply one other streetlight, and are targeted at cities for residential areas and businesses to light parking lots and other areas, he said.
“This could be the next large growth industry for the future, eventually employing 1,000 or 10,000 people,” said Mike Kazmierski, CEO of the Colorado Springs Regional Economic Development Corp., which helped recruit Rocky Wind to the Springs. The renewable energy industry was one of several industries targeted during Operation 6035, a volunteer effort that last year developed a new economic development strategy for the Colorado Springs area.
Rocky Wind could help Colorado Springs Utilities meet a state requirement to get 10 percent of its electrical power from renewable sources by 2020 if enough homeowners and businesses buy the rooftop systems, Mayor Lionel Rivera said. The city also plans to apply for state grants to buy the company’s wind-powered streetlights to replace some of the thousands of traditional streetlights the city has turned off as a result of budget cuts, he said.
Rivera also said the rooftop units won’t require any zoning approvals, but could be barred by neighborhood covenants — though he hinted the city could try to override such covenants as it did to ban wood shingles on roofs. He also said the Colorado Springs City Council, which acts as the board of Springs Utilities, also may look at giving rebates for customers who install rooftop wind turbine systems, just as it does for residential solar energy systems.
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