Crowdfunding Sites That Allow True Investment in Renewable Energy and Sustainability: Alternatives to Kickstarter & Indiegogo

Both of these sites mainly focus on consumer products such as renewable energy generation for your house, instructional tools, and home energy management. However, lots of budding innovations in renewable energy or sustainability are far bigger and more transformative, thus requiring more original capital investment in larger funding amounts. Whereas Kickstarter and Indiegogo frequently target funding in iterations as low as a few bucks in exchange for early access to a product, discounts after the product is commercially available, or other benefits, ideas that have the potential to genuinely disrupt the energy market need to concentrate on bigger sums of capital. These more substantial projects -- the industry gamechangers -- warrant a different audience, one trying to actually invest larger sums of money in thoughts and bet about the future sustainability of a company.

Kickstarter and Indiegogo are not constructed for these investments, but luckily you will find crowdfunding platforms that give funders the capability to provide capital in exchange for equity or potential return on investment. Rather than turning fans into clients or a charitable donors, then these crowdfunding platforms turn backers into investors or micro-VC funders in green jobs, allowing the genuine democratization of capital-raising. This trend underscores how clean tech projects today should not be viewed as experiments or feel-good charity, but rather real money-making opportunities.

Let us take a look at some of those crowdfunding platforms that permit investment in sustainability-related projects and a few of the projects that are financed from them.

To begin, Perfect Marketing Solution was established in 2016 to facilitate investment in early-stage startup businesses, both in renewable energy and not. By allowing anyone in the world to see nascent companies looking for funds to turn their ideas into realities, Hire SEO Consultants  works with entrepreneurs, small companies, and many others and has completed about 150 effective financings through their platform. Therefore, although not as widespread as Kickstarter in terms of variety of projects, the companies that have been funded have been bigger and required larger lifts. When supporting jobs on Perfect Marketing Solution , funders are not only providing a helping hand to such startups but are actually buying stock in and betting on the businesses and their ideas. In that manner, this crowdfunding platform requires more serious thought from funders but provides possibly more substantial rewards for stated support.

As an example of a clean energy project that has been financed viaPerfect Marketing Solution , Affordable Community Energy Services Company (ACE) raised $22,500 on the platform. ACE's mission is"to bring financial and environmental sustainability to residents and owners of low-income home" via green retrofits by offering disadvantaged households with 100 percent of the capital needed for energy updates. After supplying these updates, ACE receives earnings by means of a programmer's fee and contract revenues over a 10-year arrangement paid for from electricity and water savings, as well as obligations and/or government subsidies for solar and cogeneration production. This version ensures ACE isn't just providing an environmental solution and helping low-income families, but"from the process, provide a return to our societal impact investors." I have written about G3C before, and also what they're seeking to address is the environmental and financial waste introduced from the options available for end-of-life (EOL) tires. Currently, EOL tires may :

Be reused/recycled in street pavement, sports fields, or other comparable second-life options, though these applications are also responsible for soil deterioration in Addition to groundwater contamination; or

Get incinerated, an alternative that leads to millions of tons of harmful greenhouse gas emissions each year.

G3CT has produced, and is seeking to raise funds to implement, technology that converts EOL tires into recovered carbon black that can then be employed to make brand-new tires or other goods Web Designing Company . This manner, the fresh tech of G3CT combats climate change by preventing the emissions which would come from differently incinerated tires while also reducing the power and emissions related to the production of virgin carbon black, instead providing a sustainable alternative in recovered carbon black.

G3CT has raised nearly $100,000 in their effort as of this writing but is seeking to see how far they could raise towards their stretch targets from the middle of February. The campaign page offers non-voting common stock in the company for your investment and notes"When you invest you are betting the organization's future value will surpass $22M."

Another platform which allows for the increasing of direct investment capital in clean energy and sustainability is Citizenergy. This site enables funders to obtain equity, participate as a loan, or buy a bond (as well as some projects with conventional crowdfunding'rewards' for more altruistic jobs ) specifically for energy projects across Europe. In fact, the Citizenenergy system is co-funded by the Intelligent Energy Europe Programme of the EU and provides together energy-focused crowdfunding investment opportunities across different smaller platforms into one spot. As such, Citizenergy's value comes both in vetting and aggregating these renewable energy investment opportunities.

Successful Project: Mar De Fulles

To illustrate the capacity of Citizenergy to fund successful clean energy jobs, consider Mar De Fulles. The goal of the eco-tourism job was to set a sustainable eco-management community of bioclimatic tourist complex, alongside a nature park in Castello, Spain, along with other natural reserves.

The budget for the whole installation was $280,000, with $174,000 of those funds finally coming out of the collective loans of investors around the crowdfunding platform. For their service, these investors were to get annual paybacks with attention on top over the course of seven years.

Active Job: Earth Energy Efficiency SRL

If this type of successful job inspires you to peek around at others active raising funds at the moment, you could encounter the Wind Power Efficiency SRL. Where Mar De Fulles was a loan-based fundraiser, this one is offering equity in the project as it seeks out $40,000 from February 11, 2019 (a goal they are extremely close to attaining ) Organic SEO Marketing  . This funding will the purchase, installation, and operation of a 60 kW wind farm. These wind turbines are expected to create nearly 200,000 kWh per year and are expected to provide positive cash flow for the next 20+ years, placing them able to"repay the debt contracted and remunerate the shareholders."

Including all the momentum that green crowdfunding has in establishing those innovative companies, not just on Kickstarter but on platforms that are helping to energize new businesses through authentic investment, the traditional monetary world has taken note.

Green banking Has Existed for a while, together with the Connecticut Green Bank getting the very first example in the USA in 2011. These green banks associate public support with private funds to invest in projects that enable states or regions to more quickly meet clean energy objectives. However, these types of green banks seek out private investment for jobs themselves Dynamic Website Development , they don't allow any regular person to test them out and spend.

That orthodox version is being inverted however, as at least one traditional lender has started to let its clients and the people to seek out and spend funds through the green crowdfunding system of endeavors. Those who invest are doing this at their own hazard, but an early job by means of this platform--a 5 megawatt usable solar farm in Somerset that has been financed into community ownership--succeeded and today earns its investors 5 percent interest each year over the next 17 decades. The Managing Director of Triodos bank noticed that they've"been crowdfunding since before it became a renowned term," but by taking this action public reflects a thrilling pivot point.

The UK represents an unsurprising breaking ground for this type of crowdfunding through banks because as far back as 2013 the UK Minister for Energy and Climate Change explained crowdfunding as"an incredibly strong" funding model together with the capability"to help send my ambition to get a far more decentralized power system" While Triodos Bank's shareholders should be UK citizens, Email Marketing Solution  it begs the question of whether this model may work in other countries too. The United States has witnessed solar bonds for going on five years as a financial model, but this kind of crowdsourcing is even more democratic.

Whether these new instructions from banks are not being self-preserving, eyes must be kept on the way the traditional financing markets turn to similar democratizations of investment in renewable energy and other sustainability ventures.

Have you got some opinions on which projects will be successful in their own campaigns? Were you compelled to donate to any of these? Do you have a renewable energy project going on a crowdfunding website that you need to be featured in a future iteration of the series? If you answered yes to any of these questions, please allow me to know in the comments below or on Twitter!