I have mentioned “WindTree” of maybe two decades ago: Showing photos of pre-existing, simple, standard, spinning rooftop ventilators, claiming they were the answer to wind energy, rationalized by only citing the huge potential power in all the wind in the world, selling “territories” giving the buyer the future right to sell their future supposed product in a given geographic area. They couldn’t sell you a turbine, but they could sell you a territory for a mythical turbine. Someone got in trouble, don’t remember the details.
But for “real wind people”, the Magenn MARS system was nothing but an easy-to-identify ripoff. Only an “idiot” would come up with it, and only another “idiot” would invest in it (I remember a figure of ~$7 million?) , but was it a fraud, or just a bunch of “idiots”? Turns out that, as intelligent as we humans can be, we can also be really dumb. Especially when it comes to things that are invisible, like wind!
And not only for “real wind people”, but for anyone with common sense, the hollow tubular blimp of Altaeros also looked like a non-starter, due to the hollow central area requiring more fabric material, thereby costing more, while holding less lifting gas, than a standard off-the-shelf advertising blimp, not to mention being weaker and more flimsy.
Their entire effort could have consisted of merely hanging an off-the shelf Skystream turbine, which is what they did use, from a standard advertising blimp, which could have been accomplished for about $10,000. But no, they used the fact of having attended MIT to raise, what was it, millions of dollars? Probably used to pay a bunch of high salaries for years on end for a project that could have been accomplished by a single dedicated person from a garage?
It was the “MIT” pedigree that bugged me. That assumes they had highly developed and sophisticated analytical skills, and that some careful comparative design choices must have been made, but no, with all the “education” they were just like a teenage kid, or any uneducated crackpot tinkerer, just going with their gut instinct. I’m sure the hollow tube was supposed to focus the wind, enhancing output, which it may have, to some limited extent, but was that worth losing most of your lifting volume? And was it worth compromising the integrity of what could have been a standard blimp that could survive at least moderately strong winds, to end up with a design so frail and flimsy that anyone could plainly see it would not do well when the wind got strong?
So was it a fraud? I mean, if someone from MIT says something should work, who is an investor with no engineering background, to question it? Aren’t they relying on the MIT peoples’ say-so, just as investors were relying on Theranos to tell the truth about their (lack of) a successful product?
But in the case of Theranos, one could point to definite workarounds, such as using standard, off-the-shelf testing equipment and claiming it as their own results. I guess that would be like Altaeros installing standard wind turbines on towers, or even just using those dreaded diesel generators, and claiming the power came from their blimp turbine. But the Theranos thing involved things you could see, even if you needed a microscope.
In the case of Altaeros, as with Magenn, “Wind is invisible, so people can imagine it doing whatever they want!” 