Is This Product a Scam or Merely Idiotic?
A reader by the name of Will Watson asks a question about my lambasting the Joulebox as a silly scam: In your last sentence you refer to a scam or a group self-delusion. Does this mean that there is not a positive track for this product?
Correct. In addition to the outright BS, there are numerous asinine elements, i.e., generating hydrogen with some of the energy while storing some of it in batteries and some of it in ultracapacitors. Ludicrous. Then you have this fabulously expensive two-axis tracker or a 2KW system. Ridiculous. The levelized cost of energy for this will be astronomical.
Do me a favor: call him and ask him to refer you to a satisfied customer. Be ready for crickets.
Craig,
I have no doubt this product seems pretty dubious, but I would hesitate to label any would be inventor dishonest, or a deliberate fraudster without performing even a modicum of due diligence!
It’s quite possible for the individuals involved to be completely honest, just merely wrong or deluded.
Your adoption of a more more extreme political stance over the last two years, seems to have have lowered your threshold for tolerance. You now seem really eager to deploy your stockpile of pitchforks and burning torches, without any more evidence than mere suspicion or malice.
JouleBox is marketed by a cpmpany called ECO-GEN Energy Inc from Van Nuys California, and invites visitors to inspect their facilities in Van Nuys and manufacturing plant in Paramount, CA.
Since you live close by, I would have imagined you might have accepted that offer, before lambasting these guys and accusing them of criminal activity.
I’m not saying the product is of any value, or the promoters are serous scientists, but I’m not going to make serious allegations without any evidence, except what I read on Facebook!
What I do find disturbing, is your increasing anger and frustration which has I believe leads led you more and more, to condemn without evidence, refuse to recognize the flaws and errors of your heroes, and when challenged retreat in a general refusal to “waste time” on acknowledging your own errors or even bothering to confirm or debate information that runs contrary to your agenda.
You’ve become increasingly eager to condemn the “deplorables’ for their transgressions, while steadfastly refusing to recognize your own flaws and errors.
In my last post, I provided some detailed history of Eco-Gen Inc and it’s company officers, sufficient I believe to be cautious about investing, but equally sufficient to exercise caution before calling either the company or the directors and employees, fraudsters or dishonest without further careful investigation and actual evidence.
From your home in Santa Barbara you could easily spend a morning visiting the Eco-Gen plant, met with their founder and technical guys, and be home in time for lunch. It might be a waste of morning, but at least you would speak with some authority based on personal impressions.
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When Pons and Fleischmann (of cold fusion fame) began discussing their bogus results, it’s unlikely that they were deliberately committing fraud. They had a result that they were excited about, and immediately rushed to the media.
But of course, their result was a non-reproduceable artifact in a bad experiment.
Whether they were intentionally committing fraud is a matter of pure speculation. I believe – at the outset – that they weren’t, and the fraud developed later to try to defend their earlier indefensible claims.
But whatever the motivation, their irresponsibility caused an entire field of bogus research to develop… tens of billions wasted without reason looking into a nonsense idea because two people were undisciplined with their interpretation of an instrumentation error. Those tens of billions in wasted research have an opportunity cost, but they also have an extremely large reputation cost. How many HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of conversations between scientifically literate people and regular people have basically been along the lines of:
“No, cold fusion is not a thing. There is no theory to suggest that it will work, and no repeatable experiment that suggests a positive result. No, that doesn’t call into question the integrity of scientific research. No, that doesn’t mean that there is no hope in renewable energy. Of course we should still support research..” etc..
While the idiot selling “Jouleboxes” might not have the capability of doing that much harm, most people would have thought two research professors playing with nickle and copper wouldn’t have been capable of doing that much damage either.
Putting falsehood out into the world can cause tremendous harm. In the renewables world, between hydrogen fuel cells and dozens of nonsense energy storage options and complete absurdities like algae oil and suchthelike… We’ve seen plenty of snake-oil salesmen draw unconscionable amounts of money from developments with real potential. Those investments fail – horribly – and leave people with a distrust in renewables, or a conviction that renewables aren’t market viable… In both ways this causes real harm, not to mention the poor sod that actually buys some completely non-viable option.
The most important thing that we can do as a community is police the community.. when someone sets up a bogus business, the best thing we can do is knock it down quickly.
In short, I side with Craig. Help people avoid the nonsense, to help channel money where it can do good, and help avoid a reputation of inviability for the renewables sector at large.
Oh, there is a huge different crackpots, i.e., those who believe what they’re saying and frauds, who don’t. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, though I’ve run across many clear attempts at fraud during my soon-to-be 10-year tenure at 2GE, and I don’t have too much compunction on calling them out.
Craig and Glenn,
I think your replies symbolize how far your standards have deteriorated in such a short time.
Craig, once you would have hesitated before condemning anyone as a charlatan or fraudster. At least performed a modicum of research or gathered a bit of evidence, before bringing out the tar and feathers.
Glenn, I’m sure once you must have had some sort of inquiring mind, and some ethical standards, before you became so self-righteous and convinced of your own infallibility. As an analyst myself, I’ve made a modestly successful living relying on old-fashioned due-diligence and evidence to support my judgements, certainly before I start name calling and accusing people of fraud, but I guess I’m just an old fashioned conservative skeptic. (actually, I try to avoid name calling).
Again, Glenn, I’ve no wish to be gratuitously offensive, but Craig always describes you as a “Senior Analyst”, and that carries an imprimatur of being a qualified person who opinion is always supported by careful, comprehensive, unemotional and unbiased evidence and rational methodology in drawing a conclusion.
You seem somewhat lacking in these disciplines, so I’m guessing you must work for a family firm where the environment may shelter you from consequences. (but that’s just a guess, for all I know, at work you may be a different person).
Analysts (in my opinion) should never be “me too” followers. Not of Craig, or anyone! The discipline requires remaining independent, accepting only factual based evidence, not advocacy, however eloquent or emotionally appealing.
Craig, like you, I have my doubts as to the value of this device, but then I’m 13,000 klms away and must rely on information available from commercial and scientific intelligence outlets.
But you live virtually next door ! Before I call out my neighbors (or anyone) as fraudsters, I would be especially careful to personally perform at least a little research and take the opportunity of personally meeting the people behind the project and the device itself. I would imagine that a few hours spent visiting the project to evaluate with first hand knowledge the value of the device and the integrity and sincerity of the people behind the project, would be important.
In recent years you have become only to willing to make quite outrageous statements about the integrity of projects, often based on no more than personal prejudice. ( I can recall you calling a large scale project ‘non-existent’ and a scam, despite the fact that a little research would have informed you of the existence of three large multi-million dollar working prototypes ! Even then, you persisted in calling the project(s) fraudulent because the conflicted with your preferences).
Some years ago, I made a rare and sustained attack on a large scale project. Before I did so, I spent considerable time and careful diligence gaining a comprehensive knowledge of the project and the promoters.
I took especial care to be accurate and scrupulously fair, since one of the principals was a political adversary and professional competitor whom I repect and wouldn’t attack without good reason.
The project was the “Better Place” battery swapping scheme, and for a while I seemed the sole critic, completely out of step. “Better Place” had, and still does, an army of devoted followers, making the project seem more like a cult than viable technology.
For a while “Better Place” was the darling of green investment. The enterprise attracted more than $3 billion investment from such supposedly hard nosed investors as, GEC, GM, Google, Morgan Stanley, HSBC Renault, Bank of France,Lazard Asset Management, Danish Government, Ørsted (Dong) Energy,($ 110 million), Capital Group various, EuroPacific Growth Funds,Pensions funds and Israel’s richest man Idan Ofer, who personally invested $US850 million.
Better place was singled out by an enthusiastic President Obama as a worthy recipient for US funding grants.
In six short years, Better place went from being “the future” to Bankrupt and liquidated in 2013 with zero return to shareholders.
When it was all over, one of the most prominent promoters and sometime CEO, Evan Thornley, commented, ” the collapse came as big surprise, why the company failed is something I will always wonder.”!
Evan Thornley, is an otherwise successful Australian venture capitalist, technology entrepreneur and former leftist politician.
During the heyday of “Better Place”, I encountered considerable fury and vilification from Better Place supporters, even among my own clients and colleagues.
The only satisfaction I received from seeing my reports and analysis vindicated so precisely, was deterring several institutions to which I belong refrain from investing and losing money.
Despite all the controversy, I was never convinced of any major fraud, just the over excited optimism of people who wanted to believe, and suspended reality in pursuit of adream.
Boasting, “I don’t have too much compunction on calling them (frauds) out “, can be commendable. However, the “calling out” should only take place after a suitable amount of evidence has been gathered and analyzed.