I’ve been meaning to share this full story publicly for a long time, but something held me back…
In 2017 I was in Lviv, Ukraine.
I went to Ukraine initially because I wanted to attend Eurovision, which was being hosted that year in Kyiv, Ukraine.
My father was born in Ukraine, and my name, Yaro, is Ukrainian… sort of.
Yaroslav is a Ukrainian name, although Yaro is not a common abbreviation, yet I still reverted to this explanation whenever anyone asked where my name is from.
Needless to say, there were reasons to visit Ukraine, but that was all I intended to do. To visit, briefly.
I never imagined that I’d end up living there for six months, buy an apartment and start a solar farm project.
I also didn’t foresee how a pandemic and then a war might be just around the corner.
So, how did all of this happen?
It Begins With Ethereum
In 2016 I was in living in Toronto.
I’d made some new entrepreneur friends in the city, which led to attending a dinner with some interesting people doing interesting things.
One of the people at the table that night was the founder of an online education business focused on a new cryptocurrency called Ethereum. He was a partner with the father of Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum.
At the time I knew what Bitcoin was. I also thought I was too late to invest in it since it had exploded in value to over $1,000 per Bitcoin. I figured I’d missed the boat on that one!
I didn’t really understand what made Ethereum different to Bitcoin. I wasn’t even confident in my understanding of Bitcoin.
Despite this, by the end of the dinner that evening, I walked away with the impression that Ethereum may well be ‘silver’ to Bitcoin being ‘gold’. ETH (the token that powers the Ethereum network) could become a highly valuable commodity, which at that time was still new, trading at around $10 per token.
The $10 entry price for ETH seemed favorable. If Bitcoin was $1,000, surely ETH could reach $100 (sound logic I know).
It helped that I had some cash to play with, thanks in part to sales of the new version of my online course and membership site (all inside The Laptop Lifestyle Academy today), and also because my mother and grandmother had both died back in 2011-2012, so I had received inheritance.
I didn’t want to blow the money my mother had left me on a highly speculative new tech investment gamble, but knowing I had her money invested in safer things, meant I felt more willing to go higher risk with the capital earned from my online business.
I figured if I put $100,000 into ETH and it went 10x, I’d turn it into a cool million dollars.
Over the next few weeks I studied Bitcoin, Ethereum/ETH and began to investigate how I might purchase some.
Thanks to YouTube and documentaries, I felt better informed about cryptocurrency and understood why Ethereum, by adding a programmable software layer, offered a different value proposition to Bitcoin, which was more a pure decentralized currency.
However, I wasn’t yet technical enough to deal with the hassle of setting up online wallets, moving fiat currency to an exchange, converting my USD or CAD to Bitcoin and ETH, and then moving the tokens to my wallets. It all just seemed too hard.
I did understand online trading platforms for stocks and thus went looking for something that allowed me to trade and hold cryptocurrencies in the same way as I hold company stocks, with the platform acting as a custodian for my crypto, holding it in their wallets, and in return making it easier to purchase crypto.
This was riskier than holding my own crypto tokens in my own virtual wallets on the blockchain.
I would unfortunately learn this lesson the hard way years later when I lost approximately $17,000 USD I had sitting on a Vancouver cryptocurrency platform called Einstein Exchange that became one of a long list of companies where the founder ran off with the cash and tokens and was never heard from again.
Back in 2016 I came across eToro, an Israeli trading platform that was gaining traction in Europe (I thought it was Spanish given the ‘bull’ name and logo). It gave people the ability to trade in company stocks and crypto, and had a unique ‘social’ aspect where you could copy-trade other users on the platform.
As an Australian-Canadian, I didn’t have options like the US platforms Coinbase or Robinhood, which frankly I don’t think I knew about at the time anyway.
Wealthsimple, the tech upstart Canadian equivalent for trading stocks did not support crypto yet, so eToro seemed like one of the few options available to me at the time, although it would eventually be forced to leave the Canadian market due to regulations.
I signed up for eToro and took advantage of their instant Paypal funding option. This was the simplest way to get money on to the platform, however I was capped by how much I could send in each transfer.
I can’t recall what the restriction amount was, but I do remember it meant I wasn’t able to just send $100,000 in at once. I had to do smaller amounts, and because it took a few days to move the funds from my bank, to Paypal and then to eToro, at best I could deposit once per week.
At first the throttling of how much I could invest didn’t bother me as I wanted to be careful investing in this very new, very speculative asset class. This was the wild-west days of alt-coins just starting to pop up, and there was a good chance ETH would go to zero.
However, it wasn’t long before I got caught up in the hype and greed, which is easy to do when you watch the price rocket up so quickly!
I watched as ETH rose in value to $12, then $15 while I was busy moving my money into eToro. I was able to finally make my first purchase at $18, but could only purchase $15,000 USD worth.
That $18 price was up to $22 pretty quickly, so I sent more funds to eToro, all while the price kept rising.
The crazy times had just begun.
The 2017 Crypto Boom
Throughout 2016 and into 2017 I transferred more and more money into eToro, buying mostly ETH, but eventually some Bitcoin as well when I realized it was still on a run and wasn’t stopping.
This was a moment I had dreamed of experiencing since I was a teenager. A chance to ride the wave of a tech boom.
When I was 19 years old, in 1999, I experienced the dot-com bubble of crazy tech stock price rises. It was exciting, but extremely frustrating as I had no money to invest.
I watched the headlines of the massive price gains every day, while I was busy struggling through a university degree and working on my little Magic: The Gathering card game website and e-commerce store. I was in the tech game, but selling Magic cards online was not part of the tech boom, at least for me.
So here I was, in 2017, with some cash to play with and a tech boom happening right before my eyes… and what a ride it would become!
Over the course of a year I pushed in about $180,000 USD of my own money. It wasn’t all at once, adding more usually when a dip in prices hit.
Everything wasn’t up up up all the time. Price dips were common. But so were the rocket ship rises that *always* happened shortly after.
I’d never gained and lost so much money (on paper at least) as quickly as I did during these months.
I’d have the eToro app open all the time, some days watching as I gained $30,000, then $15,000 the next day, and another $25,000 by the end of the week!
Then one of those dips would hit, and I’d watch as $20,000 was wiped from my balance in one day.
Eventually, as my gains outweighed the loses, and I’d poured more of my own money in, my capital had pushed beyond half a million dollars, and it was still rising!
It’s an exhilarating feeling when you make $50,000 in one day from doing nothing. I’d made that much money in a couple of weeks from launching one of my courses, but that required a lot of work.
In early 2017 I left Canada for Ukraine, still watching the ETH price rise and rise as I traveled around and attended Eurovision.
My eToro total balance pushed up beyond $700,000 as the year progressed. I’d stopped putting my own money in by this point as I thought the prices were too high to buy in, but I was quite happy to keep holding what I had.
I did dabble in a few alt-coins, buying small amounts in obscure cryptocurrencies designed to do unique things, hoping to gain 100x returns when the price popped.
There were also ICOs – Initial Coin Offerings – crowdfunding campaigns to raise cash for a crypto powered idea, where you receive tokens as your ‘ownership’ in the project.
I never hit the jackpot with these lessor-known tokens, but I was lucky in one way… thanks to my bank declining my credit card purchase!
There was a project I was fascinated with called Envion. The idea was to park mobile crypto mining units (shipping containers that were full of crypto mining rigs – computers set up to ‘mine’ crypto currencies) right next to solar farms. The solar energy powered the computers, which worked away to generate crypto returns.
I decided I was going to partake in this ICO to the tune of $50,000 USD. I barely flinched at putting this much money at risk. I felt so rich with my huge eToro balance.
I tried to make my deposit several times using my credit cards, but none of them worked. I wasn’t able to transfer money in any other way, so eventually I just gave up.
In 2018 and beyond, during the crypto crash and massive ICO fallout, Envion was one of the larger scandals. Over 90 million euros was raised in the ICO, but the project never happened and went into liquidation. I’d luckily missed out on having my money stolen.
After Eurovision in Kyiv was over, I traveled back to Lviv, which I was really enjoying as a comfortable and very affordable city. I did some brief trips around Europe, and then returned to Lviv again for my birthday in July.
As 2017 continued toward the back half of the year, the crypto market remained on fire.
One day, after another rocket-ship week, my eToro balance tipped above that magic mark – $1 Million dollars. I remember capturing a screenshot and sharing it with some friends.
You’d think once I’d hit this number that I would finally take out my winnings. But of course, like so many people, the greed kept me in the market, especially as the prices were still rising!
I mentally set myself a new target. I needed to make $1.2 Million, that would mean I’d made $1 Million in pure profit taking out the capital I’d put in.
So I kept holding.
The Green Energy Tariff
My eToro balanced dropped back below $1 Million.
It wasn’t a crash, just the usual dip as people take profits. I was still comfortably sitting in the $900,000+ range, an incredible return on investment for my $180,000 put in.
But it was all paper profits. My money was at risk and I was willing to risk it.
Despite being under the influence of the easy crypto money I’d made in 2017, I knew I had to eventually sell my tokens and put the cash to use.
I wasn’t sure what I would do with it. Start a new business? Head back to Canada and invest in property? Move the money into more stable, less risky ETFs and stocks? Start some kind of charity?
Around the time that I was pondering these financial decisions, I was also considering what to do next with my life.
I came to Ukraine initially with a girl I had dated in Canada, which had turned into just a friends traveling together situation. She went her own way, beginning a relationship with a French man she’d met online and moving in with him in Paris.
This left me with a completely open agenda.
When I started out as an entrepreneur in my late teenage years my primary goal was freedom.
I wanted enough money to be independent, live anywhere, travel when and how I wanted to and not worry about my financial future.
Now in my late thirties I was there. I had no anchors, no people needed me, no pets, dependents, enough cash and income to be anywhere and do anything… and I felt lost!
I wasn’t interested in moving around solo. I didn’t have a clear next step, a goal, or a person or people who were guiding my decision making.
I felt about as free as I ever did, yet I also felt lost and a little lonely.
I had lots of potential though, and potential always makes me excited.
This was a somewhat dangerous mental state I was in, although I can only see that today looking back years later.
I was very much open to anything and perhaps undervalued the financial windfall I had made.
With no wife or children or even a girlfriend, I didn’t have a person or family who I needed to factor in when it came to money.
I could literally do anything with my money. Anything at all.
As a result I could — and eventually did — make reckless decisions with how I spent my cash.
At the time though, they seemed like good choices. Fun choices. New exciting choices.
To be fair, based on projections, what I was about to do didn’t seem that risky. Definitely unorthodox for me, but not that far off the entrepreneur path I usually walked.
It was just the unknowns around the corner that would eventually highlight the risks I was taking.
A pandemic. A war.
It all began with a new Ukrainian friend.
His name is Andriy, and he was introduced as the cousin of the girl I initially came to Ukraine with.
I liked him. He spoke good English, was friendly, had a similar sense of humour to me, and offered to show me around.
He was young, around 25, ambitious and smart. He was working within the local government at the time and I got the impression he was good with people, good at getting things done.
I can’t recall the first time it was mentioned, but during one of my stays in Lviv, he told me about an opportunity called a ‘green energy tariff’.
To be honest I didn’t know what that meant, but after a few clarifying conversations I came to understand the concept.
The Ukrainian government was offering to pay a higher rate for green energy, if you built a green energy project in Ukraine. Build a solar farm or wind turbine or hydro electric station, and you would be paid a per kilowatt fee higher than the going rate on the open market for energy.
This program had already been up and running for a while. Andriy, working for the government, was very aware of it and all the variables that needed to come together to make it work. He wasn’t in a financial position to build anything himself, but with funding partners, he could make it happen.
At first when he told me about the tariff program I was mildly interested, but never considered it seriously.
Fast forward to the end of 2017 and I’d just purchased a plane ticket back to Canada. I wasn’t sure what to do, but Canada was always the default, so I was heading home.
Andriy said to me, before you go, let’s meet again at a cafe and talk about the green tariff. I agreed and we sat down and looked over the specifics in more detail. Timeframes, return on investment, etc.
I walked away from that conversation and thought about it more seriously. I liked the idea of building something physical. I liked the idea of supporting the green energy movement and helping Ukraine with energy infrastructure.
I also liked that Andriy would be the guy making it happen. I generally do better being the person who brings an asset, but not the person building the product or the service. My previous and later successful partnerships worked because I brought my audience (customers) or funding, but I am not the person servicing the clients or building the thing we are selling.
This was definitely one of those fork-in-the-road moments.
I could leave Ukraine and go back to Canada and figure out what to do next. Or I could stay in Lviv, commit to building a solar farm and settle in for as long as I was needed.
One path sounded a whole lot more different, exciting and new. I had to admit that my ego got involved too.
I liked the idea of being the kind of entrepreneur who builds a physical business like a solar farm, rather than just another person selling something digital online. I couldn’t wait for the day I could write a blog post about my solar farm, showing everyone how different I was to all those other digital content entrepreneurs — which I had been too for most of my career.
And here I am, writing that blog post, telling a different story to the one I expected to tell.
By the end of that supposed to be last day in Lviv I had canceled my flight, told Andriy I was in and ready to build a solar farm with him, and was busy looking for a longer term AirBNB to live in.
I got so excited about ‘moving in’ for a longer stay that I signed up for a gym membership, got my online dating profiles back up, and even planned to learn Ukrainian.
I was going all in.
Solar Farm Deal & The Crypto Crash
As the last months of 2017 passed, Andriy and I met regularly to keep the solar project moving forward.
It turned out to be more complicated than I expected. Why I had any expectations at all is a mystery given my complete lack of experience.
One thing that definitely changed was the amount of money I would invest. At first I considered putting in $50,000. That seemed like a safe starting point to build a small solar farm.
As time went on, it became clear that a ‘starting point’ for a solar farm was going to be in the millions of dollars. Perhaps that should have been obvious going in.
While Andriy went about meeting with potential partners, connecting with farmers who we could rent land from and government officials to fill out paperwork and apply for permits, I pondered how much money I would contribute.
One thing was certain, the bigger the project, the more return on investment.
Here’s how things were supposed to play out, by the numbers:
- As founders, you put in roughly 30% of the funds to build the solar farm, with the remaining 70% coming from a bank loan.
- Other costs like maintenance, security and land rental would come from the revenues of the project.
- Each year, somewhere around 10%-15% ROI would be generated depending on how much the sun shined. Initially this cash flow after expenses was to be used to pay back the bank loan and capital funding by the project owners.
- After the loan and initial capital cost was returned, the profitable years that followed would go as cash flow to the owners, minus any taxes.
I put some feelers out to wealthy friends and contacts who might want to contribute, but no one was interested. Ukraine wasn’t an easy sell, even back then before the war.
Maybe that should have been a red flag, but I was not going to turn back. I was ready to be a risk taker.
Andriy managed to secure one partner, a local energy producer called Eco Optima. They were already big players in all areas of energy, from wind and solar, to gas.
Andriy told me despite our project being quite small compared to their others, they were excited that a Canadian wanted to invest in Ukraine. I attended a couple of meetings with the owners of the company and with help of a translator walked away with a good feeling about them.
As we headed towards December 2017 everything was coming together. Our land was secured, contract details signed, permits in place, applications approved for the green tariff. It was go time.
In the months leading up to December we’d settled on project size. It was going to be a 3.6 MW (megawatt) solar farm with total cost of nearly 3 Million Euros. My initial contribution of capital was 430,000 Euros, which at the time was over half a million USD.
So how did I go from thinking I was putting in $50,000 to ten times more at $500,000?
This was the project size that we settled on based on the land we secured and the amount of loan we could get from the bank. I could have rejected the plan. I could have insisted on something smaller, but I didn’t. I agreed and we moved forward.
The true answer is that I rationalized investing the money because I had my crypto winnings. The money I’d made mostly from ETH felt like money from winning the lottery. I didn’t earn that money from any effort. I took a risk and rode a wave. Reinvesting essentially gambling winnings into a solar project seemed like a good use of the money.
With over $900,000 USD sitting in my eToro account, I figured taking just over half of it, still leaving me with more than double my initial investment left over was something I was willing to do. Using money made on a gamble to make a new gamble in green energy felt good.
There was another benefit of this plan. It forced me to finally exit my crypto holdings and turn it into USD. The timing, as it turned out, was fortunate. Things could have gone very badly if I didn’t decide to build a solar farm.
By December 2017 I was back in Canada. I liquidated enough ETH to make the $430,000 Euros needed for the solar farm, but kept the rest in the market.
Then in January 2018 the crypto crash happened. I watched as my remaining $400,000 USD in ETH and Bitcoin rapidly fall by over 50%. I was able to exit still with a good overall profit, but I was far from that $1 Million USD I had during the peak.
If it wasn’t for needing to pull out over half of my crypto money for the solar farm, I could have very likely watched most of my profits disappear in the crash.
That being said, if I did ride the 2018 crash all the way down wiping out most of my profit, but kept on holding, and then rode the next wave back up a few years later, I would have over $2 Million based on what ETH and Bitcoin are at today.
Whether I would have held during the bottom for several years or stayed in the market during the entire next run up in price is a very big IF. I doubt I would have timed the market that well, no one ever does.
In the end it didn’t matter, as eToro was forced to leave Canada due to regulations, which meant I was forced to sell all my crypto on the platform.
I should confess that I forgot about taxes. My crypto profits contributed to a tax bill of $170,000 CAD later that year because I held it all personally in my name. Ouch.
It was a wild crypto ride for a couple of years, which resulted in building a solar farm in Ukraine.
The Pandemic & A Russian Invasion
It’s 2018 and I’m back in Canada, living in Vancouver.
My day-to-day life is growing my new startup, InboxDone.com.
I do have one task left for the solar farm though — to wire the money.
Everything is done in Euros for the project, so I have to convert my USD into Euros and open up a Euros bank account for my company.
The way the transaction plays out is as follows:
- I do a shareholder loan to my Canadian company to deposit the $500,000 USD that I personally made from crypto.
- My company then converts the USD into Euros using the Wise.com service, and deposits the Euros into my new Euro dollar company account.
- I then wire the money to Pure Power’s bank account, our company in Ukraine which I am a shareholder of with Andriy and our partners Eco Optima. This money is a loan from my Canadian company to our Ukrainian company.
All of this costs money. It’s amazing how many fees eat into everything from banks, consultants you hire to help with paper work, accountants, lawyers, etc.
The wire I send has to be for the exact amount of money required in the contract or it will be rejected. Ukraine has strict anti-money laundering laws as they are trying to crack down on corruption to eventually qualify for European Union membership.
I carefully review all the bank account details for the wire transfer, confirm with the bank teller that everything looks right, and she clicks the send button (well I think it’s a send button anyway!). My money is on the way to Ukraine.
A few days later I breath a sigh of relief as I hear from Andriy that the funds made it and the project is now going to begin construction.
Over the following months Andriy sends me pictures now and then as the land is cleared for the solar farm, trees cut, then the base framework goes up. Finally the solar panels are added and we are connected to the grid.
We have a solar farm, which you can see in this video I recorded with a drone:
We also put together a small website under our Pure Power company name with information about our solar project. I consider one day we may have more solar farms, wind turbines and hydro electric projects all under this company. It’s a nice dream.
I especially like the logo:
As we headed into 2019 our first revenues return when our electricity is sold. It’s helping to power local communities, which is a nice feeling to experience, another benefit from this kind of business.
Given there is more sun in summer, we make more money during those months. It’s interesting to see all the projections and then the actual income reports as the money comes in.
By the end of the year I start receiving back interest payments on my loan. This is the first time I receive money back, everything has been going the other way up to then, and it feels good.
Some people said I shouldn’t trust Ukrainians at all, that I’d lose all my money. I felt that fear, but I liked Andriy and trusted him. I liked our partners at Eco Optima. Everyone seemed to be doing their best to make this project happen.
However, it wasn’t until I started receiving money back that I felt vindicated.
Although I did start to receive returns, the schedule of payments meant that my initial capital loan wouldn’t be paid back for years. I’d be receiving interest payments only initially as paying down the bank loan was the first focus, then my loan would be paid back and then finally profits would return.
The profits weren’t scheduled until 2025, which felt a very long way away in 2018. Still, it was nice to know that some money would come back every year.
Once again I forgot about taxes. Those interest payments were considered income for my company, so I had to pay taxes on it to the Canadian government. Sigh.
2019 continued much like 2018. Every now and then Andriy would have some news for me, like a potential deal to sell the solar farm to an investor, but nothing ever eventuated. Interest income came back into my Euros account, I paid taxes on it.
In July of that year it was my 40th birthday, which I had planned a special party to celebrate. I invited friends to come to Lviv, learn about and experience Ukraine, and of course we could visit the solar farm.
I detailed this trip in my 40th birthday blog post you can read here.
Everything was going as planned. The solar farm took a back seat in my mind. It became sort of a passive investment. There were occasional surprises, but nothing major.
Then we all know what happened in 2020.
Covid.
I returned from a trip to Hawaii in March 2020, waiting out Covid in my new one bedroom condo in Montreal, which I had recently moved to.
At the time I didn’t connect the dots that Covid might impact our solar farm, but it did.
The Ukrainian government had to scale back payments as the economy went through hard times during the shutdown.
At first it was just a delay, but by 2021 Andriy informed me that our contracted tariff rate, the amount we were to earn for selling our electricity, was going to be renegotiated down. We’d still earn a return, but it wouldn’t be as good as originally projected.
This meant our timeframes would change. It would be slower to pay back the bank loan, slower to return our capital loans, and slower to reach the profit phase.
I was upset, but a pandemic and a shut down economy was not something we planned for.
By 2021 the payments were coming back in again and I had some interest due to be paid to me.
The money was sitting in our Ukrainian bank account but couldn’t be sent to Canada until I provided a tax declaration document that I had to provide each year.
It was a pain to get this document. I had to wait on the phone with the CRA (Canada’s tax agency) to request the document, have it sent to a service in Ottawa that would get the document notarized, approved by the Ukrainian embassy with a stamp and then sent to Andriy in Ukraine.
This document confirmed my company was registered in Canada for tax purposes, and since Ukraine and Canada have a tax treaty, it meant that Ukraine would not withhold any funds for taxes as I would pay them in Canada.
This whole process usually took about about a month and cost me $1,000. Thanks to Covid it had slowed down as the Canadian govt was not operating at peak staffing levels and there were delays doing things in Ottawa.
Now you may recall, around late 2021 a certain Russian army began amassing along the borders of Ukraine.
I was worried. The news reported it was just Russia showing force, but they wouldn’t actually invade. That would be crazy.
Andriy and our Ukrainian colleagues and friends said the same.
Russia began to pull back some of its forces and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was all just for show.
Then they moved the forces back.
By this point I was getting very worried and was calling the CRA to find out why my tax document hadn’t arrived yet. They blamed Covid for delays. I told them I was trying to race an invading army, so could they try and process it quicker!
The document still hadn’t arrived as we began 2022. Then February hit and as we all unfortunately know, that army crossed the border and began firing rockets.
The document I requested arrived in March. I felt that sad irony feeling. You laugh at the same time as you cry. It was too late to do anything with as martial law descended on Ukraine and no money was allowed to leave the country.
At this point though, I wasn’t really worrying about money as much as I worried about Ukraine and my friends there, especially Andriy.
The War
What can I say about a war.
During the early weeks and months I was glued to the coverage, soaking up everything.
I found myself crying as I worried about Andriy and my friends there.
I hated the injustice of it all. War is the worst thing humanity does to itself.
I asked Andriy what the plan was if the Russian army took over the entire country. I was worried for him as he used to work for the local government, which may mean he would be on a hit list if the war made it to the west.
I also had to ask him the hardest question — what if he was killed or disappeared? His wife would be the contact point and take over his ownership shares in the solar farm. That was the first and I hoped only time I’d have to talk about this topic with him.
As the war progressed, Andriy sent his wife and kids out of the country, while he did what he could to help locally. I could only imagine how heartbreaking it must have been to say goodbye to his family.
I was in touch with my Ukrainian friends and made my apartment in Lviv available to refugees fleeing from the east. Eventually three families moved in, somehow sharing a two bedroom, one bathroom space.
It was a rough time, but as we all know, the invasion didn’t play out as expected. The initial expectation was the Russians would not invade, but once they did, the expectation was the country would collapse and the government would be replaced by a Russian puppet regime.
As I write this in late 2024, the war is still on. It’s been horrible, but Ukraine still exists and Andriy and his family are living in Lviv again, despite the threat of missiles landing on them from time to time.
The solar farm still operates and although the Ukrainian government did have to initially stop and then reduce payments, money has continued to flow in. All of the income has gone to paying back the bank loan, which as I write this is now 100% paid back.
I’ve been asked many times if my solar farm and apartment are safe from the rockets being fired at the country every week. The short answer is yes, relatively speaking.
It wouldn’t make sense to target a solar farm. You’d take out a few panels, which in the grand scheme of things don’t produce that much electricity. That being said, Russia has been targeting the energy grid to make life as worse as possible for Ukrainians, so knowing our little solar farm helps contribute power to the country is nice.
As for my apartment, it’s currently fine.
There have been a few unlucky buildings (and people sadly) hit in Lviv — even one I lived in when I first arrived there. It was quite a shock to see the photos of the destroyed building facade I used to walk into every day.
Generally speaking you have to be ‘unlucky’ to be hit by a rocket, sort of like being in a car accident. Still I can’t imagine what the stress must be like going to sleep each night even just thinking of this possibility, not to mention the frequent warning sirens.
One of my friends there told me she jumps into her bathtub for protection when the warning sirens go off as she is too far away from any bomb shelters. This was not reassuring and I prayed for her safety.
Did I Not See This Coming?
There’s one question you may have been thinking as you reached the war part of this story…
Did I not consider that Russia would invade Ukraine, given it had already taken Crimea, parts of Georgia and Moldova, and there was an active battlefront on the east side of Ukraine since 2014?
The short answer is yes, I did. I even raised this concern with Andriy in a sort of half-joking manner.
He said no, it wouldn’t happen. I believed him.
At the time war felt very far away, especially on the far west where Lviv is. The city was lively, full of tourists, a strong IT sector and generally felt like a nice place to live that would only get better, especially as they moved towards European Union inclusion.
The solar project was specifically structured to return Euro dollars, not the Ukrainian currency the Hryvnia, to help protect it from fluctuations from whatever was happening in Ukraine.
While nothing is foolproof, I felt confident to move forward.
Again I can point to the fact that I felt I was investing gambling winnings from crypto, which made me more open to a new riskier project with a lot of features I liked — green energy, supporting Ukraine, a solid return on investment and building something physical in the real world.
Could I have found another less risky investment, in another country or back home in Canada? Yes.
Could I have remained conservative and invested in the stock market or property, both of which I already had experience in? Yes.
Looking back, especially during the covid and war periods, I felt regret about investing such a large part of my net worth in the solar farm.
You never know what is going to happen to your finances, so while you might feel flush with capital after a win, a year or two later it can be the opposite.
By the time the war happened in 2022 I’d made many angel investments that have yet to return anything, I’d lost money on some risky bets on the stock market, my new startup company was growing a lot slower than I expected, while income from my previous coaching business was drying up.
I felt far more conservative with my money because of all these things. I am older too, over 40. I would never put so much capital at risk in a project like a solar farm in Ukraine today.
All that being said, I understand why I made the choice back then. Deep down even during covid and the war I felt (and still do today) that things will turn out okay, given enough time.
I also think about what I would have done with the money instead if I never did the solar project.
I can imagine throwing more cash into angel investments, buying another property in Canada, risking even more on the stock market, buying crypto again, or paying developers to build software. These are all things I actually did during those years, but with less money than I might have spent if I still had my crypto cash.
The most important thing to me is I don’t believe having the money would have made a material difference to how I lived my life. Do I want the money back? Yes of course, and I still expect it back, just at a different speed to originally planned. Living through Covid teaches you patience if nothing else!
The one ‘benefit’ after all of this is that things got so bad with the war that whenever the possibility of money coming back to me rises it feels like new money, even if it’s just my own money returning.
One of the reasons I decided to finally share this entire story is because we just made the last payment on our bank loan we took to start the project – over 2.3 Million Euros of loan + interest paid back!
Hearing this news got me excited again about the solar farm and I wanted to finally write this story here on my blog.
Those solar panels have been ‘working’ during the past seven years, paying back a very large amount of money. Even during a war the Ukrainian government has continued to pay for the electricity we produce, even if the schedule of payments certainly has not gone to how we originally planned.
What Happens Next?
I’m going to leave this last section short and sweet as I want to update this article again as things progress in 2025 and beyond.
Right now the war is still raging, martial law is still on, and thus no funds can be sent outside the country. I can’t get any money out of Ukraine even as the solar panels continue to generate energy.
Obviously I hope the war stops and peace prevails for the sake of all Ukrainians who want to live in their country. I’d also like to return and visit one day soon, to see my friends and purchase some of my favorite chocolates from Lviv Handmade Chocolates.
Given our bank loan is paid off, money from the electricity we sell going forward will accumulate in our Ukrainian bank account. We are also owed back payments, which could further bolster our bank balance.
Once funds are allowed to leave the country, I will see Euros flow back to my account in Canada, starting with interest payments, then loan repayments and finally profits. This is going to happen over a period of years, and who knows at what pace.
To be honest, I still feel very tentative about everything. With wars, elections and so many geopolitical games being played, anything could happen. I’m not counting on any timeline for money coming back to me, but if it does, it sure will feel nice.
As crazy as this may sound given everything that happened since we started the solar farm, if in 2030 I am updating this article again having explained how things went well, the war ended and all my loan plus interest and profits where paid to me, I will be ready to invest again!
I could very much see myself doing another energy project at that time. Would I build something in Ukraine again? — You never know, I am sometimes in a risky state of mind.
Yaro
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