Morris Dovey wrote: ...
Yes, that's key when writing proposals -- they need to be directed. One of the assets the local or university incubator centers bring into play is knowledge in that area of where to go for seed money -- not only do they know the well-known players (The Gates Foundation, Paul Allen, etc., that everybody knows about), they know and have contacts w/ the lesser-known and those who specialize in specific areas.
I don't know exactly where DeSoto is, but even here in very rural SW KS we're fortunate to have a Community College which has a Corporate Development Division and a budding incubator program in cooperation w/ K-State. I would expect there would be similar resources near you.
Change your point of view--you're not actually shrinking their markets; in reality you're expanding them only with an alternate generation source. You're too close and thinking your fighting against them rather than look at the big picture of "where do we go from here?".
EPRI has had involvement in alternate energy sources "for since forever", long before country---err, make that green was cool.
There was a demonstration combined wind/solar project w/ TVA as the prime utility near Kingston where the I&C Center is 15 years or more ago. They've put quite a lot of funding into fuel cell and hydrogen as well and that's just the tip of the iceberg. If there's anything whatsoever to do, however remote, w/ generation and transmission, EPRI's interested.
As I emphasized in the sidebar w/ Lew, these are energy companies and their objective is MW on the grid at reasonable cost and at the necessary reliability. It's those last two little tidbits that are all too often being ignored in the present discussion. The objective isn't "green" generation--that, after all, is actually a fairly trivial problem if that's the only ultimate objective. It's getting it at an acceptable cost point and particularly, making it a portion of an actual operating grid that is 24/7 that is the hard part.
That's where I worry about falling into the German trap of over-committing too early to a particular technology and getting a large infrastructure in place that is simply not cost-effective. That has the very high risk of making the entire country even more at a disadvantage in the global economic picture and it is, despite anybody's wishes otherwise, a global economy and competitive position therein is and is going to remain significant.
I've not looked at what DOE has in their Advanced Generation funding programs for current RFPs for quite some time. That's where the coal flow test loop funding came from after EPRI had put in about $1.5M over roughly six years looking at initially five alternate technologies before eventually choosing the one to continue with. A couple of the others w/ other vendors are still continuing w/ other funding sources (either internal or other backers than EPRI).
While that focuses on the general grid generation issue, there's great interest in the niche markets as well. I personally think your concepts would be well received.
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