A form of utility in which all users own shares. Electric cooperatives are common in rural areas that are expensive to serve because of long distances between users. Frequently, the government contributes in various ways to rural cooperatives to reduce costs to individual owners/users.

This report was published by the GAO in September 2004. This report talks about current wind power generation in the U.S. and prospects for growth, economic contributions from wind power to farm income and rural communities in ten states, the trade-offs for farmers of owning a wind project vs. leasing land to a wind project, and the USDA's efforts to promote on-farm rural wind development.

This 2000 report out of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reviews an assessment of distributed wind generation and it's associated business, policy and technical issues, and includes action steps for facilitating the growth of distributed wind.

Click here to view the report.

From this page, you can access Windustry's directory of companies that do work in wind and community wind.

The companies are broken down into two main categories:

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