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[Leafsnail]

That's brilliant!  I mean, when you pitch your idea to the hospital, they'll be like "Yeah, it would be so much easier to perform operations if we had lighting and electronic machines!  And I was getting tired of all those freezing cold wards anyway."

...Uh, I mean, isn't it going to be quite difficult to undercut commercial energy companies who operate on a much larger scale?  And would you be able to provide reliability, especially if you're using wind/ solar...?

[Eagleon]

Hospitals already have backup generators, unless they're exceptionally shitty hospitals. But solar/wind might sell for them too - in an emergency like an extended blackout, it would make their fuel last longer. If you've got a generator switching on with power-failure anyway, its reliability isn't a problem at all.

Re: Wind/solar start-ups. It's a growing industry, depending on where you live, with the brand spanking new customer base of everyone and anyone that pays for electricity. My suggestion if you go this route - target apartment buildings with tenant-payed utilites (virtually all of them), particularly single or two-story ones that have the roof space for solar. As far as I've seen, most people are going for the middle-class homeowners that want to offset their bills a little, but you can hold up two big reasons apartment owners should be interested - the ability to sell their tenants power rather than having all that extra money go to the electric company, and the ability to offer very attractive free utilities incentives to bring in new tenants if the market turns sour.

[dr_random]

That's brilliant!  I mean, when you pitch your idea to the hospital, they'll be like "Yeah, it would be so much easier to perform operations if we had lighting and electronic machines!  And I was getting tired of all those freezing cold wards anyway."

...Uh, I mean, isn't it going to be quite difficult to undercut commercial energy companies who operate on a much larger scale?  And would you be able to provide reliability, especially if you're using wind/ solar...?

The key to have a decent plant to sell heat and electric power is to source a cheap fuel. That could be biomass that would otherwise go to waste or unused heat from an incineration plant or factory or just natural gas. You offer the energy and the client won't need to have separate power and heat suppliers - making the boiler in the basement practically obsolete. This is not emergency power, it's base load energy. And cogen plants work - it's even efficient when run on gas because you don't let the heat go to waste. Even General Electric offers solutions for this.

Surely noone would use wind or solar as base load energy for a single client - it's better to feed that into the grid. As for the commercial energy companies: It's not that Con Edison was all over the place. Ususally they just sell electric power, don't they?

[Grakelin]

One of the big ideas behind the risking of money is that stuffing it in a savings account does not actually increase your wealth, even though it may be collecting interest. This is because the value of your money goes down the more you hold onto it. If you put $100,000 into a bank account today so that things will be easier for you when you are 75, you will not make as much as if you had put the same amount of money into buying a house to sell later on. The trade-off is that you are far more likely to have something terrible happen to your house than your bank.

[Zrk2]

Unless your bank goes broke from lending too many shady people (like us) money to buy those houses.