Absurd Gravity Storage Non-solution Energy Vault Being Built, Once
It’s unclear what the Chinese participants’ motivations are, but Chinese people aren’t immune to idiocy and cons
Energy Vault was so obviously flawed in so many ways in its first incarnation that I didn’t even bother to critique it. I expected it to wither and die, unmourned. But I didn’t count on the SPAC craze which is so heavily distorting cleantech markets, or the ongoing ability of Bill Gross to get a lot of money for poor ideas. Like Bill Gates, he made his money in computers, although in the dot-com era with a bunch of shrewd and lucky bets. And like Bill Gates, he keeps getting a lot of money thrown at marginal climate technologies.
This isn’t to say that either Gross or Gates’ hearts aren’t in the right place, but they are clearly listening to the wrong technical advisors when it comes to energy. As I asked and answered a couple of years ago, What Does Bill Gates’ Favorite Energy Guru, Vaclav Smil, Get Wrong? Smil misreads the energy transition, especially around natural gas, and ignores rejected energy and economies of scale for manufacturing. These critiques are only on his efforts around energy and renewables, not on the rest of his body of work, of which I have no opinion. But they do lead to Gates and others thinking…
