Wind energy credits are generating profits

DENVER — Quayle Hodek is sitting on a gold mine of green power.

He is the keeper of valuable "wind energy credits" for customers who want the electricity powering their homes and businesses to come from wind farms sprinkled across the nation.

His latest customer is ski giant Vail Resorts, which bought 152,000 megawatt hours of wind credits on Aug. 1. It joins a growing list of customers, including many Fortune 500 companies.

Hodek is the founder and chief executive of Boulder-based Renewable Choice Energy, which he started six years ago.

Not bad for a 28-year-old University of Wisconsin dropout.

"We are as much of a marketing and sales company as an energy company," Hodek said. "When a home or a business buys wind energy credits from us, we ensure that a wind farm will add that much electricity to the grid for that customer."

So far, Hodek's venture seems to have paid off.

The privately held Renewable Choice Energy, with 20 employees, already has doubled its profits from a year ago. Hodek declined to reveal the company's revenue and profit figures.

Clients include Whole Foods, Toyota, Honda, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald's and Sprint.

Vail's recent purchase became Hodek's second-largest; the biggest is Whole Foods. The ski resort company bought enough credits to power 20,000 homes.

Renewable Choice also has thousands of residential customers.

Hodek's business model is simple.

His company buys renewable energy credits from about 10 wind farms in the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota and Wyoming.

The credits, say for a certain amount of electricity, are a sort of guarantee from the producers that they will put that amount of wind-generated electricity to the grid on the customer's behalf.

The company then sells those credits to customers, for a profit.

Green-e, a San Francisco-based company that runs the nation's leading certification program, verifies that no two credits represent the same electricity put on the grid.