As the prevailing summer winds begin to blow, bringing with them an influx of seasonal residents, Vineyard Power, the Island’s nascent energy cooperative, begins its first seasonal membership campaign, flooding local airwaves with advertisements and fanning out across the Island in a series of informal public presentations and question-and-answer sessions. One such presentation was held last Thursday at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury. And if the session was any indication of the coming debate among Islanders over their energy independent future, it will be marked by optimism, candor and occasional skepticism.

With a price tag of nearly $180 million, Vineyard Power’s plan to build 17 wind turbines and supply the Island with 43 megawatts of homegrown power by 2016 is more than three times more expensive than the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, the costliest building project in Island history.

“Like [Vineyard Energy Project founder] Kate Warner said, it’s the biggest dream Vineyarders have ever had,” said outreach coordinator Laura MacNeil.

Martha’s Vineyard currently consumes over 750,000 barrels of oil annually and Vineyard Power puts that figure at over one million barrels by 2050 with a conservative business-as-usual projection. Paul Pimentel, chairman of the Vineyard Power board, believes that the Vineyard can cut that number in half. To do so it will need to supply at least three quarters of its energy from its own renewable sources, specifically wind power, in addition to investing in efficient buildings and heating systems as well as electric cars.

While the Cape Wind project will sit only miles from State Beach, the power it produces will be sold back to National Grid for a wholesale price and then distributed throughout New England, while returning any profits to its investors and shareholders. Vineyard Power with its own turbines would also dump its power back into the grid, but would generate enough electricity for the Island and return its profits to the cooperative, effectively reducing and then stabilizing energy costs for Vineyarders.

In order to lure the massive federal loans and private investment its business plan depends on, Vineyard Power must gain Islandwide support in the form of members. To that end the cooperative has already recruited 756 Islanders since its inception in November. With a summer membership campaign just underway, the goal of 2,000 members by the end of the year seems well within reach.

Still, last week’s question-and-answer session was occasionally marked by a tone of incredulity, most vocally from Harriet Bernstein of West Tisbury, an early member of the cooperative. Ms. Bernstein wondered aloud how an enterprise as seemingly quixotic as a locally owned and operated energy cooperative could compete in the cutthroat landscape of energy markets and utilities, an arena sometimes seen as skewed toward the powerful and well connected.

“Do you want to know how we do it?” Mr. Pimentel offered in reply, like a magician about to reveal the workings of his illusion.

Vineyard Power’s financial plan is at first blush astounding in both its simplicity and scope but almost Rube Goldberg-like in its actual operation. The three main sources of financing for the project are, Mr. Pimentel said, an $82 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a $57 million private investment, and the sale of $33 million worth of derivatives called Renewable Energy Credits.

The largest chunk of capital will come in the form of a government loan administered by the Rural Utilities Service, an agency of the USDA. Vineyard Power plans to formally apply for the loan sometime in 2014. The success of that application is contingent on demonstrated community support (members) and an environmental impact statement, which will be funded by membership dues and initial private investments (mostly in the form of promissory notes).

The second largest chunk of capital, $57 million, Vineyard Power hopes to raise from a group of private investors. Why would investors want to sink millions of dollars into a humble rural energy cooperative? The answer, Mr. Pimentel explained, is because of a renewable energy investment model known somewhat rakishly as the Minnesota Flip. In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, after an initial investment of $57 million, the group of investors would effectively own the project for 10 years, even though operational control and decision-making would still rest with the cooperative. For the investors it is essentially a method for sheltering money while at the same time benefiting from lucrative tax credits, but for Vineyard Power it is a form of desperately needed start-up capital. After 10 years, ownership would “flip” back to Vineyard Power.

Finally, Vineyard Power would sell $33 million of Renewable Energy Credits that could then be bought and sold on the open market.

“If you think the value of RECs will go up in future because there will be a carbon tax, for example, you would buy those RECs now and hold onto them for a few years with the expectation they’ll go up,” explained Mr. Pimentel, “It’s a lot like buying a stock.”

Besides individual traders, larger institutions have begun snapping up RECs for what some would argue are more cosmetic reasons. Harvard University recently purchased large shares of them, specifically from Vinalhaven, a seasonal resort town in Maine with a year-round rural population much like the Vineyard. The sale of these RECs helped to finance a similar wind turbine project in Vinalhaven, but also to boost Harvard’s green sustainability campaign.

It is not a simple pitch, and this is one reason Mr. Pimentel prefers the intimate setting of informal question-and-answer meetings. He understands the sometimes rarefied language of economics and utilities law may require a more one-on-one approach. He goes to great lengths to explain even the most esoteric details, not only of financing the cooperative but also the engineering and ecological particulars of the project (in one interesting aside Mr. Pimentel explained that it will take four years for a turbine to offset the carbon input of its manufacturing, shipping and construction costs). But even after such elucidation, some were still difficult to sway.

“There’s the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is,” said Ms. Bernstein.

Richard Andre, director of Vineyard Power, had an anecdote at the ready for such skepticism.

“The guy who ran the cooperative at Samso [an island in Denmark widely hailed as a model for rural energy cooperatives] used an expression,” he said. “He explained it as if you saw a $20 bill on the ground and wondered whether it was real. Why hasn’t anyone else picked up the 20 bucks? Is someone with a fishhook going to pull it away from me when I go to reach it? But he said, to his amazement, no. It’s actually real. There really is a $20 bill on the ground just waiting to be picked up.”

Whether that bill is picked up or not is largely up to Islanders, echoed Mr. Pimentel.

“This is the essence of it, these small gatherings in the community,” he said to the small crowd in West Tisbury. “We can either get together and act as a community. Or we don’t.”