Jade Queen

Alternative Energy Storage: It's All About Price vs. Performance

I want to pose a few comments that speak to the difficulty of investing in an environment that is skewed to hurt innovation unless it hides itself from view for a pretty long and careful incubation.

Large organizations can harm innovation by buying patents and locking them up, for example, or by ostentatiously floating a bad idea like direct corn-to-alcohol technology, for which they have received subsidies, then lobbying the subsidies gone to kill off lesser capitalized start-ups, even if the start-ups had better ways of doing things. They can also hope they have crashed that entire thread by doing it badly in a showy way.

Making alcohol out of corn or other food products isn't a completely bad idea if you feed the mash to animals. The animals are then healthier because the micro-organisms that break down difficult-to-digest parts of corn add important nutritional components. The micro-organisms also decrease the famous flatulence from eating corn directly. Consequently, the animals are healthier and win prizes at fairs, after which their owners receive uninvited visits from the BATF.

Smart people can make alcohol out of kudzu, for example, an abundant weed with huge starchy underground roots and cellulosic tops that runs rampant over the south. But for a long time we have had a government that discourages distributed attempts at generating wealth in reasonable ways, where, for example, energy is made close to where it will be used, thus avoiding the loss and possible interruption of porting it over long lines.

Staple foods should be grown this way as well, and we would have different varieties suited to different micro-climates. To some extent, this is getting done, but the remarkable process of governments wanting to condemn small operations to, say, put an LNG pipe through them, is also stunning on a punishing-small-innova... index.

Lobbying that results in enriching cartels and protecting them from start-up competition is a terrible drag all over the planet right now. Some parts of the U.S. are safer from this than others. The federal government has been running over even state governments that try to resist on behalf of their people.

We have incredible potential that is locked up in bad practice. As bad as the U.S. is, most other places are worse, though Brazil and Europe have been able to get our car companies to produce more efficient vehicles, as noted above.

If I were to invest in a company like ACPW, my concern is whether they are safe from unfair regulation. Do they have protectors in congress? Who are their customers, can they help to protect them? How will they break through the entrenched processes of existing businesses in an industry used to monopoly and entitlement? Will they sell to consumer-owned operations first? What is the business plan for the present situation?