Head UP and Head DOWN

Part of "owning up" to being an inventor is learning a process that keeps doing a reality check. Over and over. Making sure you are working on a product that will likely have a use in the marketplace. The earlier you learn it will not go the more time and money you save. Some of it is guess work. But not all of it, and we can shift the odds by paying close and dispassionate attention to the marketplace.  Early and often.

I had a discussion with a guy who specialized in modeling the performance of solar systems a while back. He was a fierce skeptic about concentrator collectors. He thought the complexity of the tracking and the optical losses would never catchup with the head start given to flat plate collectors.  Interesting talk and I largely agreed. I think I have met most of his objections (I was not in a position to disclose, I just let him lay out his concerns and objections.)  It was a super helpful talk.

One of the things that lead me to was looking into the concentrator charlatans. I had seen a number of them on my earlier survey of the environment but had not thought they were anything but ambitious and misguided. It has been my practice to alternate between
1) looking around at the others in the field of concentrating and hybrid collectors.
and
2) minding just my work to get things done.

So on one of the "take a look around" periods... off deep in a discussion board I found a guy really making a pest of himself about an Australian concentrator company's claims about performance and an ever-slipping delivery date. Pest or not he was pointing out some all too familiar patterns. One prototype. Lots of investment news. Lots of distributorships sold. Few technical details. Then they vanish...

The question is: are they scamming just the investors or themselves and the investors or are they just a technology also-ran? It is hard to tell. In some ways it does not matter. The economic system (as it stands) needs everybody to try something and we let the market sort it out. But now I think a significant number are/were not trying to accomplish a new, more efficient solar collector but instead to take a good looking prototype and a slick pitch from would-be green investor to would-be green investor and take as much money from each as possible.

But where does that leave me? I'm not pitching investors so I guess that gets me off the scammer list. But that leaves me two other options: Scamming myself (blinded by pride) or a technological also-ran. Oh, I guess there is the "guy who figured it out" option too. Only one way to find out which of these three.

Charge on.