It seems like there are plenty of people talking about alternative fuel and alternative energy.
But isn’t it refreshing to come across people who just DO something instead of prattling on and on about it?
Kudos to Alternative Energy Solutions of Wichita and Prairie Fire Cooperative of Healy for doing just that with this week’s news that they are building a biomass pelletizing plant in western Kansas. Leave it to a family-owned small business and fourscore and six Kansas farmers to just shut up and do it.
AES markets an Italian-made boiler that can turn just about anything into energy and ash. And getting biomass into a form that can be easily handled and transported is one of the biggest hurdles to making big heaps of trash into fuel _ a hurdle that Prairie Fire seems to have crossed with agility.
More kudos to Sunflower Electric Cooperative, which will use the Prairie Fire product at its coal-fired plant in Holcomb to provide real-world data on how well the biomass pellets perform in an electrical generation plant.
Wouldn’t it be great others among the green talkers would join the effort and support Prairie Fire’s product?
A few entries back we talked about the inevitable retail impact of soaring gas prices.
Today, we got some proof from the Starbucks coffee chain. Second-quarter earnings are down 28 percent, customer visits are tumbling, expansions have been placed on the back burner and CEO Howard Schultz — the same guy who’s suing to keep the Seattle Supersonics he once owned from moving to Oklahoma City — blames the gas pump.
Locally, we hear rumblings that foot traffic continues to plummet in Wichita-area restaurants. Wichita movie mogul Bill Warren said fuel is eroding his bottom line as well.
The retail fallout from gas prices is like a thunderstorm rolling in from the west. Stay tuned for the damage reports.
If you’re looking for a good networking opportunity — along with some free food and drinks — you’re invited to Office This tonight and every first Thursday of the month for the Wichita Eagle Business Today First Thursday Business Reception.
OK, granted, we need to work on the name.
But it’s a fun event at the converted Wichita Mall at 4031 E. Harry where tenants and any other business people from the community are invited to share a cocktail and swap business cards from 5:30 p.m. to 7. There’s great music, too, providted by Eagle food writer Joe Stumpe. (Yes, there’s a bit of a bias here since he is my husband.)
Hope to see you there.
Thomas Etheredge hit Wichita with equal parts bang and bluster in 2004, and that’s probably why the rise and fall of his western theme park reached almost mythical proportions in the past year.
But there’s nothing mythical about what happened at 77th Street North and I-135. In fact, entrepreneurial experts don’t see anything particularly unusual there.
To the tin-foil hat crowd: If you know where this mythical bag of money Etheredge gleaned from Wild West World is, call me. There isn’t a shred of evidence, either anecdotal or in court documents, to suggest anything but the obvious: Etheredge saw the future a year ago when he told me his family would be ruined if the park didn’t succeed. Like most entrepreneurs with a dream, he went all in. And like about 80 percent of them, he lost.
In fact, Wichita entrepreneurship guru Fran Jabara sees Etheredge in the same light as a whole raft of entrepreneurs who’ve succeeded and failed.
Entrepreneurs are “idea people,” Jabara said, not detail people. They live on a tenuous razor’s edge, with success as close as the expertise they surround themselves with and failure as close as their own egos.
When you look at Etheredge in that light, he drifts toward a sympathetic figure: a man scarred by his past business failures to the point that he was unable and unwilling to hear the voices around him urging a different path for the park.
Etheredge isn’t the only person who lost in the Wild West World saga. But he did indeed lose.