http://www.boatinternational.com | February 2016man nowadays – just the 30 employees instead
of 250. His business is the wind, specifically
the harvesting of it. He didn’t start out in the
industry with a “save the planet” philosophy.
In the early days, back in the 1980s, it was all
business, but he admits over the years he’s
become something of an evangelist.
“You’ve got to walk the walk. I’m certainly
a believer [in green energy] now. In the
beginning I was just a believer in not being
a lawyer. And maybe having an opportunity
to do something in California where the sun
was shining more often than in Vancouver.
That sounded like a pretty good idea,” he says.
The Sunshine State back then was governed
by Jerry Brown, who is currently enjoying
another belated term in oice. In the early 1980s
he had the nickname Governor Moonbeam,
and it was subsidies and tax credits introduced
by Brown that drew early wind entrepreneurs
to the state, including a young O’Sullivan,
then barely 30. “Around 87 per cent of your
investment was covered by some form of
rebate or credit or depreciation. So if you put
up $100, only $12.50 came out of your pocket.
As bad as that may sound, it actually spawned
a multi-trillion-dollar industry.”
The wind wasn’t his first stab at making a
living. He trained in law, but “I didn’t like being
a lawyer so quit and I started in real-estate
development”. But interest rates blew to 20 per
cent, which killed that dream. Then one day
he got a call. “It was my uncle, asking if I was
interested in investing in a wind farm project
in California. Well, I had no money – I spent it
all starting the real estate business – but I did
have lots of friends who trusted my judgement.
My choice was going back to be a lawyer, or to
try something diferent.”
O’Sullivan raised the required $100,000 but
by the time he got it together the window had
closed – another investor had slipped in ahead
of him. No matter, he would start his own wind
company, with his friends’ backing. The site
of his first turbines was Tehachapi, about
100 miles north of LA, in between the San
Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert, and
one of the windiest places in the US. It was
a genuine wind rush, a mania not seen since
the 1850s when 300,000 “forty-niners” made
the journey west to stake a claim.
Within a year O’Sullivan had sold that
business and struck out on his own, eventually
building his new wind company into one of the
largest in the US, with operations all over the
world, from India to Italy to Mexico. It was the
sale of this business in 2012 that allowed him to
buy his yacht, the 40 metre Horizon Komokwa.
“I never thought I’d be able to get a boat as big
as this,” he says, “but it was just good timing
because, at the same time wind was booming,
the market for big boats was cratering.” He
found her in a shed in Turkey, basically brand
new after her first owner pulled out. He boughtit of a creditor, at a very agreeable price, and
got her shipped to Vancouver. The first thing
to go were the Italian toilets, replaced by
Headhunters, the air-con piping was changed
and a bulbous bow was added at Delta’s yard
in Seattle, as well as new hull paint. In 2013 he
and the boat were ready. “I’d had it in my head
to go around the world since I was in my early
20s. But I had businesses to build and I was
fairly ambitious and didn’t want to be a bum
on a boat, doing work wherever I could just
to pay for fuel,” he says.
His dad first got him into boats. “He
couldn’t aford to buy one, so built a 34-foot
cabin cruiser when I was seven years old,”
O’Sullivan remembers. “He made a steamer
out of a carpet tube and bent the stem himself.
It had a GM diesel that he bought for $100 from
war surplus. When we were kids, in order to get
dessert, he would have us sanding teak plugs.”
It was launched when O’Sullivan was 10 and
from then till 2015, every single family holiday
has been spent on a boat, mainly exploring the
beautiful British Columbia coastline. It was
only when he was in his early 20s, though, that
O’Sullivan truly learnt how to run a boat. By
then his dad owned a 15 metre former fisheries
vessel, complete with fireplace. “It was really
fun. When I graduated I asked him if he would
teach me how to run it and he said ‘sure’ and
handed me the keys and told me to figure it out
by myself. That’s when I really started to loveI’d had it in my head to go around
the world since I was in my early 20s
Right: a young
O’Sullivan, on left
of picture, aboard
a Vancouver ferry.
Below: giving a TED
Talk on building
a wind farm.
Far right: his
40 metre Komokwa
in Montenegro