Flower Turbine

As I’ve mentioned many times, I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing many hundreds–perhaps a thousand–of cleantech business plans.  I would say, to be charitable, that maybe one in 20 holds any water.  Most of the others are asinine, and some are fraudulent.

What makes this interesting is that it’s sometimes unclear whether the author is a crackpot or a fraud, i.e., whether he believes his story, or not. 

Here’s an interesting case: Flower Turbines.  Their pitch: Flower Turbines has created sleek, innovative, and efficient small wind turbines—with the goal to make those turbines the foundation of a large global renewable energy company. We are already expanding into e-bike charging. Join us (meaning invest in our company) as we scale up!

There are a few elements here that make me believe this is fraud, in the sense that investor dollars will go to salaries and the product will never go anywhere.

1) It was very clear six or seven years ago that small wind has no future, and today, it’s even more obvious.  If you Google the subject and try to find an organization anywhere on Earth that has made a success here, you’ll fail.  That’s because a) the wind conditions at low altitudes are terrible, b) the swept area (that governs the amount of theoretically available wind power) is proportionate to the square of the blade length, meaning that small is bad, and c) all this means is that the turbines themselves need to be very inexpensive if their levelized cost of energy is to be competitive, and cheap is the enemy of quality.

2) So much emphasis on investing.  “Join us (meaning invest in our company – minimum $560) as we scale up!”

3) The language:

“efficient” (It’s not; vertical axis turbines are intrinsically less efficient than horizontal axis.)

“expanding into e-bike charging” (What you use the energy for is irrelevant.)

“with the goal to make those turbines the foundation of a large global renewable energy company” (You can have any goal you want, but this is most certainly not going to  be a large global renewable energy company.)

I could be wrong about the motivations of these people, but I’m not wrong about the ultimate fate of the investors.