Why aren't they rich?

I read about many alternative energy companies and I have bought stock in a number of them.  Besides realizing the great need for more intelligence towards our energy choices they seem to have something else in common; they are going broke.  Solyndra made big news with its bankruptcy.  Politically it is a touchy topic and sometimes it appears supporting alternative energy is a negative in a political campaign.

It is to be expected that the road to energy independence and to clean energy will be paved with failures and mistakes.  That is the path forward with any technology.  Oil is a myopic solution but we tend to a a myopic society. 

Here are a couple companies I have followed over the years. 

Beacon Power  

Power plants have a sweet spot where they run the most efficient but that spot is only ever passed through as they power up during the day for peek energy usage and then power down for lower night time loads.  It is intuitive to conclude that the longer the plan can run at peak efficiency the cheaper it is to run the plant and it follows we get cheaper electricity.  It also pollutes less but that point seems to carry less weight for some reason.

The logical solution is to run at peak efficiency one hundred percent of the time by storing excess power during low usage times and then using that power to supplement power needs during peak hours.  Storage is the issue.  Houses which are not connected to the electrical grid use batteries.  Batteries have a draw back due to life span, dangerous chemicals, rare Earth minerals, etc. On a large scale such as a power supply for a city, batteries are impractical.

Beacon Power's solution is exciting.  They are using carbon fiber flywheels.  Modern material science and other technologies are used to build flywheels to turn chemical energy in to kinetic energy.  These carbon fiber flywheels spin up to 16,000 rpm in a vacuum containment chamber.  This is a very efficient way to store energy and reduce CO2 in the process.
 

Energy Conversion Devices

Battery technology is one of the things holding back many alternative energy solutions.  The auto industry has not produced electric cars or hybrid cars until recently because battery technology was not to the point to make it feasible.  Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) was one of the companies pushing the technology forward, getting it to the point it is today to allow us to have hybrids on the road.  They are the company who produced the batteries for GM's EV1.   But that wasn't enough to support a business model and the company is no more.

They also produced a very interesting product, solar shingles.  Most people don't like the look of solar panels on roofs so ECD produce solar shingle which were installed pretty much like conventional shingles, stopped rain like conventional shingles, looked much like conventional shingles but they also produced electricity while acting like shingles. 



These are just a couple companies I have been interested in over the years with marvelous technology yet sadly watched them sink into nothingness.  At the same time I have seen oil companies reporting record profits.  The Solyndra story is fuel for the anti-alternative energy argument and is being used to slow the funding of other such companies.  This is extremely sad because we need companies such as these who are willing to risk failure to drive the technology forward to make it a viable and sustainable solution.