Plug Power, Ballard and FuelCell Energy stocks are trading at 1% of peak and not going up — Recently green hydrogen for energy manufacturer and fuel cell vendor Plug Power announced that it was at risk of going out of business. Unsurprisingly, its stock price plummeted from a historical low to a slightly lower level.

AirLoom and Heirloom are both bizarre failures in the making and both received money from Breakthrough Energy Ventures because of course they did — How much technological and economic idiocy can be jammed into a single week and why does it have to rhyme? Quite a lot it turns out and no idea. Two different clearly nonsensical purported climate solution technologies received far too much fawning press in the past few days. The first…

SMRs and hydrogen for energy share some common characteristics, and one of them is the virtual inevitability of fiscal demise — In what is turning into an ongoing series of amuse bouche articles between my full course meals on things like iron projections through 2100 and supercritical CO2 hype, I’ve been having fun highlighting hydrogen-for-energy failures. This week is a tapas bar meal full of them. And there’s a bonus side…

Be skeptical when the substance is invoked for energy generation and storage gains as fossil fuel CCS propaganda lurks — Supercritical CO2 is having a moment in the sun again, at least from my admittedly odd point of view. The US DOE is once again touting the use of the substance in thermal electrical generation. The carbon capture and sequestration crowd are touting supercritical CO2 pipelines as the answer to…

There are no niches left for hydrogen as Maersk’s APM Terminals division kills its hope for that niche too — Container shipping is a big deal. It’s been an amazing success story in global trade and pivotal to making shipping cheaper and cheaper. It’s not too much to say that it’s been a big part of bringing people around the world out of poverty. But unsurprisingly, moving those metal boxes…

A recent presentation to a global group of institutional investors led to an excellent Q&A session — Recently, Jefferies Group, one of the United States largest investment banks, asked me to speak to a global group of their clients, institutional investors representing billions and possibly trillions in funds. The subject of the discussion was the future mix of electrical generation in our decarbonized world and the implications…

Conditions for nuclear generation success require governmental and military hands all over the controls — Nuclear energy has had some successful scalings in the past, but seems incapable of it today. A big part of it is that the tenets of free market capitalism cause it to fall over. The same is true for small modular reactors. As people who like nuclear tend to be…

Questions from a Q&A from representatives of possibly trillions of value were informative — A while ago, I presented to a group of institutional investors, clients of Jefferies Group investment bank. One of the big questions was regarding what they should be considering in terms of regional, national, and regulatory concerns for grid investments. That was worth a full article of its own, but…

Some much-touted and hyped electricity generation technologies just won’t be contributing that much in the future — This week I had the opportunity again to speak truth to money, a key focus of mine. We need trillions invested the right way quickly in order to get ourselves out of the climate mess we’ve created. My efforts over the past 15 years to gain sufficient wisdom to create…