Closing A Deal in Idaho – or Maybe China

The difficulties of identifying and exploiting a market – whether to provide nuclear energy or to market a new food product – is never easy and, for a start-up, notably difficult.
To wit: A company called Alternate Energy Holdings has a pretty good idea:

A small company that's pushing a billion-dollar nuclear power plant in Idaho now says it wants to build another one at a different location.
Alternate Energy Holdings Inc. says it's asking Payette County to amend a plan that governs land use, so it can build a nuclear power plant on approximately 5,100 acres in western Idaho.

This is presumably on land where MidAmerican Nuclear Energy decided last year not to build a plant, so some of the work has been done. And why do they want to do this?

Don Gillispie, Alternate Energy's chief executive, says his projects will bring benefits to rural communities.

Well, we can’t argue with that, though the AP story is so short as to be barren on details.
So we visited AEHI’s Web site:

AEHI is an alternate energy electricity generating company focused on the construction and acquisition of green energy sources – primarily nuclear power plants and solar. The company also uses renewables and technology to essentially eliminate energy bills on houses and commercial buildings.

We’re not sure how they’d eliminate energy bills, but okay. In any event, AEHI centers its activities on Idaho, or seems to, until you get to this (small pdf):

AEHI will open an office in the Chaoyang District, central business district, of Beijing in July to facilitate institutional investors for AEHI projects and joint ventures with Asian companies for nuclear plant components and other energy-related projects with US companies.

That’s thinking big. So far, AEHI hasn’t got very far past the news release stage on any of its initiatives, but then, it’s only been around for three years. We checked our friends over at Idaho Samizdat to see what they know about AEHI. Answer: quite a lot. Start here for more, but here's the summary:

The penny-stock firm has had little success in its efforts to organize a nuclear reactor project in Idaho.

It may just be that AEHI is trying everything it can to find and develop a market and interest enough venture capital to help it stay afloat until it makes a sale – either in Idaho or China. Certainly not unusual (if a bit unusually far flung), often not successful, but that’s how it works. All one can really do from the outside is speculate. Let’s keep half an eye on AEHI and see how it goes.
Not the Yangtze River – the Snake River in Idaho.