Solar Winds Energy Tower
(OTCQB:SWET)
CEO: Ronald Pickett
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS:
WSA: Good day from Wall Street. This is Juan Costello with the Wall Street Analyst. Joining us today is Ronald Pickett, CEO for Solar Winds Energy Tower. The company trades on the OTCQB ticker symbol is SWET. Thanks for joining us today Ron.
Ron Pickett: Good to be with you again Juan.
WSA: Great now starting off please give us a brief history and overview of the company for some of our listeners new to your story.
Ron Pickett: Well, Solar Wind Energy has developed a new way to make alternative energy, and the unique thing about us is that we are not only a green company but we’re profitable of our solution. It’s a green company that makes green if you will. And what we’ve done is we’ve invented a tall, hollow, cylinder structure that could be constructed in a hot dry area and for example our first client is in South Western Arizona; and at the top of the tower we introduce a regulated mist of water. The dry air must absorb the water, soon as it does it starts to sink inside the tower. As it sinks it cools, it evaporates and as that happens obviously accelerates because the cold air drops faster. And at the bottom of the tower we have these 50-mile an hour winds that we divert into tunnels that surround the base of the tower. Inside the tunnels we have typical wind turbines that spin, power generators, and make electricity. And it’s zero-carbon footprint, all clean, and very green, and very, very efficient because of the patents we have for all of the systems. We have patent for the tower, the drive system, the multiple turbine systems, and the control systems for the generating fan.
WSA: Great. So can you bring us up to speed on some of your recent news developments coming out of Arizona?
Ron Pickett: The recent news is that for three years now we’ve been obviously developing all the techniques that we now have to do this and achieving the patent we just described, they are issues that are pending. And then our business model is to license this around the world to developers, organizations, governments, and utilities. But we’ve been chasing the deal in the United States that we could control and get the first tower you know potentially up here. And we recently announced just the last couple of weeks that we’ve been successful in doing that, it’s really, really a great thrill; that we secured a one mile square site 640 acres, the definitive contract. We then went into the city of St. Louis Arizona; they have approved and executed a definitive development agreement, which guarantees us all the entitlements to build the project. And then just a couple of days ago we announced that National Standard Finance has issued us a conditional commitment for 100% finance of the plan; construction, the land construction, interest and constructions, as well as a 20-year finance possession to pay the plan off. And the – this is always 100% so our company is not only going to be able to license this out to other developers but we’re transitioning and we’re going to keep our vast majority interest of the same project for ourselves for our shareholders. So it’s a huge breakthrough for us.
Juan Costello: Great and what are some of the current trends that you’ve been seeing in the sector and how are you positioning the company to capitalize?
Ron Pickett: Well solar is definitely in today. The cost of traditional solar has been coming down; it’s still expensive, it’s still much more expensive than traditional house-fuel fire facilities but Solar Wind Energy our solution is on par with traditional plans. One of the things that differentiate us from the trend is that we are utility scales and that is we are a large project. Our tower will produce as much energy as the Hoover Dam, actually more energy than the Hoover Dam does nationally. And the trend that has really helped us is that there are two utility scale solar projects that have just recently come on line and they are successful. One is the Ivanpah project in the Mojave Desert, US Federal government has guaranteed $1.7 billion to get that fill and companies like Google help finance it. It is up and running; successful and the government has made it a successful venture there. And then there is another solar project in Gila Bend, Arizona recently turned on with a $1.4 something billion federal guarantees. It is successful and everybody is very well pleased with that. So here we have two utilities scale proven projects running, we are utility scale we’re coming right behind it and we now know that we can be online as soon as 2018 providing power to Arizona and California.
WSA: Great. What are some of the factors that you feel make SWET unique from some of the other players in the sector?
Ron Pickett: Well we are unique because we have one; utility scale and two; we have a green solution that is going to be possible. Our capital cost of building the plant is between a half and a third that of traditional solar or wind facilities that produce the same amount of that electrical power that we have. And we are on par with the gas fired plan, so if you are building a brand new utility scale plant in Arizona, you wanted to power it with natural gas, it would cost the same; it would cost the same to make that power as our plant cost. And our plant is renewable for we call it 50 years but maybe forever, it’s a concrete tower; the lifespan we call it 50 years but it could easily go to 100 years and all the parts inside it; those generators, turbines and pumps that you just maintain and replace at a very odd basis. So there’s you know, I don’t know, we call it 50 year life but who knows how long it can last and once it’s paid for in 20 years, cost of power goes down provided we – obviously it’s just mainly screws and water.
WSA: Great, and so perhaps you can walk us through your background experience Ronald and talk about some of the management there.
Ron Pickett: Well, I’m a solar energy entrepreneur I guess I should say one, my background years and years ago way back at the late 60s I was special advisor to President Johnson when he was president and perhaps the politics there in 69 I moved on and went into real estate development and developed real estate virtually all over, so a pretty good scale. And then I got involved in the 80s in financing and mentoring some young companies and one of the companies was – we invented and commercialized International Travel Medicine very successful company and now the MX trader – started in the 20s, ended up in the 10-30 dollars like base for a year, a very successful company, another company that was in waste energy; recycling facility again a public company, then took to another company that was in the internet business. I checked that on the MX very successful, so I like doing things that have never been done before. This project we’ve been working on for four years and it’s one of those projects that’s going to do good, it’s going to do very well and I’m pleased to be involved in it —it’s a global scale company and we are in the 20s right now and we hope to be graduating into the big sector sometime in the near future.
WSA: Excellent, and what are some of the factors that you feel make Solar Wind Energy tower unique from –some of the other players in the sector and what are you doing in the next 12 months that you feel will make you guys unique?
Ron Pickett: One of the unique things is number one we have a patent on this tower but the – we have two – we have a very, very important portfolio; part portfolio. First of all no one has ever created wind before on a commercial basis. So a typical wind turbine that you see, and that’s what we use by the way, can only scientifically or artistically capture a maximum of 58.6% of the kinetic energy out of wind; it’s impossible to do more than that. Most wind turbines capture about 30% if they are very, very good. Well, when you push this wind into the tunnel, you’ve got a full bite of the apple if you will. So with no wind or – escaping around the turbine, we have a good chance to collect at least 50 and probably close to the 58% that’s available. But if you think about that on the – side of the turbine, is the other half of that energy that you couldn’t collect. So we position a second turbine behind that to get 50% of that leftover 50%; it is just 75 or 80% – energy we capture. And we own the patent on that one as simple as that seems no one had ever thought of that before. So we have the patent on trailing drafty wind turbines, multiple turbines at the wind tower.
The second thing to differentiate us is that every other wind turbine is hooked directly to a generator and it spins at these variable speeds it depends on how fast the wind is blowing. Well every alternating current generator in the world whether it’s in your boat or in a nuclear power plant spends 1500 rpm excuse me; 1800 rpm to make alternating current, making direct current it would be 1600 rpm generator. These variable speed turbines and variable speed generators create the need for large inverters for all these plants to get it back to greater quality or great ready power, a big efficiency loss there. Now we saw that and we own the patent for this as simple as it sounds; turbines are driving hydraulic pumps to the camshaft and beside each one of the tunnels is a separate generating room with 11 generators of different sizes; and no matter how fast the two turbines are spinning we’re powering up that hydraulic system and then we’re powering the generators in the correct combination to expand the energy and we’re spinning them only at 1800 rpms, very efficient and grid ready and we own the patent.
So those are differentiators that set us apart from anyone else besides owning the patent on the tower. So we’re looking to capitalize on that, take that to the market and we also have invented an algorithm – a set of algorithms, a formula, we call it a energy calculator that lets us go to any site in the world, pull down the local weather data and determine how tall, how wide, how much water, how much power a plant will make on that location. So we’re taking that to the market in terms of a license agreement and we’re looking for licensing partners right now in different countries to start with some of these projects.
WSA: And any goals or Milestones for the upcoming 12 months that we didn’t cover yet?
Ron Pickett: Well our goal for the next 12 months, is to get this project in Arizona ready to put a shovel in the ground. We think we can get them to the ground in 2015 and to start securing some more partners overseas and we’re planning to head specifically into the Mid East pretty soon, we’re already got some early presence in India and then in Chile and Mexico but we would like to expand that into the Mid East. There is a great, great opportunity to eventually sell our stock in the Mid East.
WSA: Well great so as far as investors in the financial community are concerned Ron, do you believe that the company’s story in your message and website are completely understood and appreciated by them and if not what would you wish they better understand about SWET?
Ron Pickett: Well I don’t think it’s understood completely yet because it hasn’t resonated yet. We have done a conference call last night, it’s the first time that we have literally thoroughly explained this to the financial community, it’s going to take a while for that to get disseminated, I have meetings in New York this week for several institutional grade companies. They are getting there. When I make the presentation that’s pretty simple and it resonates; so it’s just a matter of time to get our story out. Opportunities like your listeners will talk about it, it’s easy to understand, it makes perfect sense and it works and it’s something we all need. We all need more energy, and we can use clean energy better than we could use dirty energy.
WSA: Well good, and once again joining us today is Ronald Pickett CEO for Solar Wind Energy Tower which trades on the OTCQB, ticker symbol is SWET as mentioned currently trading between 2-3% per share, market cap is around the 12 million range. And before we conclude here, Ronald to briefly recap some of your key points, why do you believe investors should consider the company as a good investment opportunity today?
Ron Pickett: Well, you know we have invested about $10 million in this project since we started, and it was a totally new – new first to market concept, had a lot of hurdles to get through, and we have successfully climbed those hurdles and built a company that’s ready now for the future. And our market cap is hovering right now just about where the dollars we spent are. And I think in a situation like that there should be many multiple of dollars we spend before we hit the homerun. So it’s just a matter of time for this to get out, the word to get out, for people to understand what we are doing and look at the future and see what kind of a potential there is for this and what kind of revenue base there is for this company. Once you understand that they’ll be buying the stock I’m sure of that.
WSA: Well, we certainly look forward to continue tracking the company’s growth and report on your upcoming progress, and we’d like to thank you for taking the time to join us today Ron and update our investor audience on SWET. It was great to have you on.
