daveS said: "Doug is overlooking a
lot of progress in AWE, while not explaining (in a separate topic) why
his USWindLabs has fallen so far behind. We care about Marco and
his team and look forward to their return, much as SkySails
experienced. Same with Doug."
***Doug
replies: Yeah yeah yeah, "Doug overlooks...", "Pierre
fails...", "Peter misses...", "Roddy ignores..." etc.... Oh, but
make sure you stay "on topic"...
I'm
starting to wonder if the real daveS still exists, or if we are just
reading a machine emulation, where previous daveS patterns are noted
then repeated. I think I my have mentioned, I've been doing some
real estate development? Way more difficult than AWE, which can
be relatively simple.
I have a main issue which is NOT just the progress made by any organization or person.
I'm
talking about basic competence or functionality of people, basic
honesty or integrity, or lack thereof, and how they relate to what
we've seen for ten years now.
Yes I agree that
I should be making more progress. With many other projects, I'm
trying to get the ones that generate reliable revenue done, so I can
get back to what I love, whacky windmills that could change the face of
the world of energy. Thanks for the encouragement and for the
"positive impatience" and good wishes to advance.
Here's
the difference between my efforts and most of the rest: I don't
lie, I don't tell investors I'm going to do something, then not do it.
I don't mislead the people who put their faith in me, and I don't
announce future accomplishments as though they are already accomplished
or certain to happen, then go silent when the scheduled projects are
scheduled to bear fruit. All my investors were paid back with
interest years ago. I don't owe anyone any money, and nobody is
sitting around waiting for me to do what I say so they can ever get
their money back.
If you are talked into
putting money into some investment by highly-credentialed people:
Degreed engineers, accountants, CEO's, project- and personnel-
managers, all from the top schools, all promising huge advances,
supposedly based on their collective expertise and skill, then, when
after years of waiting, years of "keeping the faith", right when the
progress is finally supposed to happen, they usually just stop
communicating, that sounds more like a ripoff scheme than a legitimate
business investment. Images of Bernie Madoff come to mind.
"I tried contacting Bernie's office by phone but had no luck."
Substitute the long-overdue AWE project of your choice.
At
some point, you have to wonder what the problem is, when you see the
same pattern repeated over and over, by various, unrelated
"teams". The people came out of the top universities.
Investors assume such highly-educated and accomplished personnel can
lay out a reasonable timeline of progress, and that they understand
their chosen subject matter and skills well enough to give a
reasonably-accurate assessment of their own likelihood of success.
One
assumes the engineers have a handle on the engineering, the project
managers understand where the project stands and where it is going, the
accountants understand where the money is going, and the CEO's have a
grasp of whether the whole thing is progressing as promised, let alone
being even worth doing at all.
Now of course
you would not expect EVERY team to get EVERYTHING right. You'd
expect a few failures. Nobody bats a thousand, even the best of
the best. But what MOST people would NOT expect is for EVERY team
to fail, for EVERY collection of such highly-educated personnel to make
the same or similar, typical wind energy mistakes. Out of all of
the promises, where is a single AWE system feeding the grid today?
A
normal person would not expect that such a high number of project
managers could all get everything wrong about what are, in reality,
very simple projects. A normal person would not expect such a
high number of such highly-trained engineers could all get the same
engineering stuff wrong. A normal person would not expect that
every project's CEO could be so wrong about the viability or
workability of supposed projects they were supposedly executing.
At some point, a normal person would likely wonder: "So which is it?
Are these people incompetent,
or are they dishonest?"
Incompetent? Dishonest?
Are there any other possibilities I'm missing?
Insane? Bonkers? Out-to-lunch? Just plain wrong? I don't know, you tell me.
The
thing is, for anyone who is not in some sort of coma, it's easy to
debunk these "future news" statements of "accomplishments" ahead of the
fact. When Magenn entered the scene with big promises, raising
millions of dollars from naive investors, a normal person like me
could, and did, just categorically, at a mere glance, tell you that it
was all BS, that the general design was long-disproven before it ever
left the ground. To me, there were only two (2) possibilities:
Either the promoters were incompetent (did not understand the most
basic engineering principles, the basics of wind energy, or even simple
math.) or dishonest (the whole thing was really just a scam the whole
time).
When daveS announced an "upcoming"
"AWE-powered concert" at a certain park in the Austin, TX area, to take
place in the summer when it was announced, I simply said "No you're
not!" Why? The promoter had no AWE system to power such a
concert available. The whole idea was to power a concert using n
AWE system. But he had no such system. So, once again "a
normal person" would say "this has got to be either an idiot
(incompetent? insane?) or someone intentionally not telling the
truth".
Same with Altaeros, coming from an
MIT pedigree: When they announced a project to power the grid in a
remote region of Alaska, even though the BAT publicized in so many
publicity photos was obviously, visibly frail, any "normal" wind energy
person (people who understand the brutal nature of wind energy) would
say "no they're not!" because anyone with a clue could see it would be
unlikely to stand up to strong winds, and such a location was bound to
have strong winds.
There's a saying: "The
difference between an idiot and a genius is, the genius knows his
limitations" (substitute nutcase, insanity, etc. for "idiot", as you
see fit).
When I was in like maybe 4th grade,
age 9 or so, a friend and I would plan our "spaceship" that we "were
going to build", and how we were going to build it. See where I'm
going with this? I had never heard of what I later came to
jokingly call "The Professor Crackpot Syndrome" at that time. But
we probably qualified. See, we planned to pick up scrap metal on
the side of the road every day as we walked home from school, then we
were going to melt it down in the furnace at my friend's house where we
could see the flames with room to slide in one of my mom's cookie
sheets. We would melt the scrap metal on the cookie sheets in the
furnace, giving us sheet metal from which we planned to build our
spaceship.
Am I sounding like an
AWE CEO yet? I mean, sure there are a few holes in the
plan. Like mom's cookie sheets were aluminum, with a lower
melting point than the steel we were finding on the side of the
road. And the furnace was steel, so it was obviously not hot
enough to melt steel. Details, details. Besides, we really
had no idea how to build a spaceship anyway. Where would we get
the engines? How would we control it? Who
cares? All we knew was we were tired of playing spaceship
in my garage, using a barbecue and lawnmower as "the controls", and
clearly needed a real spaceship for some real space adventures, so why
not build it!?
Now you may think I'm joking or exaggerating when I compare us 4th -graders saying "we are going to build
an operating spaceship from roadside scrap metal" with AWE efforts, but
am I? Take an early, and maybe the most-recognized, most
publicized AWE system, the spinning sideways blimp powered by cloth
savonius flaps, Magenn. It turned a tiny generator through what,
a bicycle wheel and fan belt? Chain? The least-effective of the known
types of wind turbine, made more expensive by adding helium, and
less-powerful, since the design included very little area in its
narrow, flappy, working surfaces that were filled with wind and pushed
downwind to spin the blimp.. It was called MARS, I think,
right? An outer-spce theme?
How is
saying that MARS machine represented an economical energy breakthrough
really any different than us 4th graders talking about building our
spaceship? I mean, both have major, glaring holes in the
story. But in both cases, pretending we are going to do it is
fun! So why not have fun, right? (Especially when people
will literally throw money at it?)
Now within
a couple years I did end up building a canoe from plans in Popular
Science. It worked great and was idiot-proof to build - luckily
for me. Turned me and a friend into the champion 2-man canoe team
at a YMCA ranch camp in the mountains. And it was a spaceship of
sorts - just with a range limited to water surfaces on a planet, and
you had to paddle it. (Just ask JoeF, you can make a word mean anything
you want!)
But heck, I had only
planned to fly the "spaceship" locally anyway. Probably mostly
just over the neighborhood in fact. We were going to drop paper
bags full of dust on this one kid's house... just like Magenn was going
to solve global warming! In both cases, any adult could have told
you it wasn't going to happen. Heck, even we as kids knew we were
really just pretending. Did Magenn know they were really just
pretending? Did you? What about the rest? How many
are really just pretending? How many actually know, deep-down, that they are really just pretending?
---In AirborneWindEnergy@yahoogroups.com, <santos137@...