Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy squealed with delight, announcing a $6 million giveaway of taxpayers’ earnings — well, and a lot of borrowing — to “two innovative marine energy projects … to develop a tidal energy research, development, and demonstration pilot site in the United States.”
Sigh.
The dream of “marine and hydrokinetic power” just won’t die. I wrote the column below more than a decade ago.
Enjoy!
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It’s a fundamental rule of PR: flaunt achievements, disregard setbacks.
Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) employed the strategy when it issued a press release about a new federal subsidy and ignored a shockingly competent account of a colossal failure.
First the moolah: On September 5th, the company trumpeted a “Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant of approximately $150,000 to study advanced control methods for maximizing the wave energy harvesting capability of its PowerBuoy products.” OPT crowed that less than 12 percent of the U.S. Department of Energy’s “SBIR and related Small Business Technology Transfer funding applications were granted in this latest funding round.”
A few days earlier, OPT declined to disseminate an unflattering story about its marquee endeavor. Oregonian reporter Elizabeth Case, committing an act of honest-to-gosh journalism, examined the status of what was to be “America’s first wave-powered utility.”
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