Oh, OK I thought he was just a well-known “visionary”. I mean, I sat on a board of wind energy experts at an investor conference, next to Corwin Hardham. I had thought Corwin was the founder of McBlarney. Anyway, Corwin himself was OK with me making fun of McBlarney, or so he said to me. He was an easy-going guy who just took things in stride. (Too bad some people don’t know when to quit partying when some big internet company wants to buy them out …)
I attended the second world AWE conference at Stanford, and yes, Fort Felker was there. I could tell it was really because NREL had enough curiosity to at least want to see what was going on in AWE - not be totally left out if it showed any promise. But I was kind of surprised too, because he really didn’t belong there. Like a fish out of water.
Fort Felker was the first and only actual wind energy person I know of to ever participate in AWE (except for people helping me). Out of all the real wind energy people, he was also the one who attended the conference. Coincidence that they hired him away? Google had money burning a hole in their pocket, so all they had to do was exceed his government paycheck. But it was a bad fit, because if an administrator type was what they needed, why did they go then down in flames? Something told me when they first hired him, it was a bad omen, probably the beginning of the end for McBlarney and their flying McBlarney-stone.
Then again, maybe Fort’s contribution was to let them know he wasn’t sharing “the vision”. Maybe he provided a glimpse of reality. But reality can change if we apply our imagination - that’s progress! The whole idea that they got stuck with a too-large, too clumsy prototype, and that meant they had to “just give up” was silly, I think. They had barely dipped a pinky-toe into the design space, barely scratched the surface of possibilities. And now everyone thinks AWE was just a bad idea. Well, there are bad ideas, and there are bad implementations… (At least they tried!)