A startup incubator firm based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, has announced help and grants for people who want to pursue renewable energy ideas.
Start-ups brimming with bright ideas are becoming increasingly important in the field of sustainable energy. And Amsterdam’s “global start-up machine” Rockstart has devised a scheme which places selected small companies bursting with killer energy ideas in an 180-day long accelerator program.
“What we do with Rockstart is we try to connect people… connect entrepreneurs to people who can support them,” Rune Theill, co-founder of Rockstart, told CNBC’s Sustainable Energy.
Rockstart’s smart energy program looks to draw on the experience of more than 75 “smart energy mentors, investors and energy partners.” Ten startups are selected, and in exchange for 8 percent equity, each one is offered a cash investment of 20,000 euros ($20,662), as well as an “in-kind” investment into benefits such as office space and hands on support from mentors.
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Read more: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/25/amsterdam-incubator-gives-clean-energy-start-ups-a-helping-hand.html
I suspect Rockstart’s Amsterdam grant programme will have no problem sourcing lots of wild new ideas for making renewable energy viable. Implementing some of those ideas might be a challenge.
I swear this is true. Less than a week ago in the largest newspaper in The Netherlands (paper edition, not online) a letter was published, which proposed the following as a solution for reducing fuel usage: to equip every car with TWO batteries. You’d start out with one full and one empty. While driving (and emptying one) a dynamo would charge the other battery. Once full the other battery would provide the energy and the first one would be charged, so one could drive forever without refill.
Now I read that letter a couple of times and there was no sign of any sarcasm or joking in it. The writer was serious. And the newspaper editor published it without placing any comments.
Remmit — it is New Age science. — Eugene WR Gallun
None of this stuff survives the first level of viability unless they can get a taproot into a governments treasury, and ultimately the taxpayers pocket. Where they can bleed the consumer for billions while producing little to nothing. The damage it does to economies, jobs and the creation of original wealth is already being felt around the world.
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Ross McKitrick: Wind Power Subsidies Triple Power Prices in Ontario
https://stopthesethings.com/2016/08/25/ross-mckitrick-wind-power-subsidies-triple-power-prices-in-ontario/
Some people say that we should wait for costs to come down before we start using renewable energy? But how exactly do they think that costs will come down? Pixies?
Costs come down with R & D and economies of scale. Which won’t happen if we just wait for them to happen.
Most of these “incubators” are the collective innovative equivalent of an Energy Dollar Store that develops and sells shoddy little crap ideas. The idea-people who shop in these stores have other objectives than actually solving energy problems. Chief among them being a line of bubble-wrapped eco-ideas that can be acquired cheaply by corporate acquisition to help pad your prospectus and press releases with eco-lingo garbage to impress your gullible investors and stockholders.
Nuclear energy research is capital intensive in part because nuclear is real base load energy, not a crap solution. If the top three of the world’s “incubators” would flush all the crap ideas out of their systems and concentrate on nuclear, a sustainable future at the present level of technology and convenience would be assured.