The Al Gore inspired Green Widget Industry.

Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth drew attention to the fact that Carbon Dioxide levels have been rising in the last couple of centuries and that this may be due to mankind's escalating consumption of fossil fuels. He goes on to claim that since CO2 is acknowledged to be one of the greenhouse gases this is leading to a runaway increase in global tempratures and we must stop it because it's bad m'kay?

Now, this is an interesting scientific theory that deserves study and sensible debate in keeping with the "scientific method" (just Google that)
The foundation of the scientific method is that fresh evidence or re-evaluation of existing evidence is encouraged.
Religious dogma on the other hand.....

No matter which side of the debate your researches or beliefs lead you to dwell I think most of us would agree that it is best not to shit in your own nest and that it would be good to have cleaner energy and less waste. New ways of generating renewable energy and storing it would be ( just like motherhood and apple pie) a good thing.

W.C. Fields: " Never give a sucker an even break"
P.T.Barnum: "Every crowd has a silver lining"
KA-ching........KA-CHING!
Here comes trouble!

Enter the GREEN SCAMMERS!
"I've invented this new clean energy device. It's going to save our small blue planet. I just need a little bit more money to commercialise it. You might like to buy some shares in our company when it floats on the stock exchange"
Yes but... shut up Keef...you're just being negative. I bet you work for BIG OIL and you're a Luddite and a DENIER.

This is by way of an introduction to my accidental obsession. Through being involved in busting one particular Green Widget Scam ( the SunCube ) I became aware that 99% of the companies that are spruiking new renewable energy devices are putting the cash down the executives trousers. They are spending only a tiny fraction of the money on engineering
R & D sufficient to keep up the charade.

Whilst I am not entirely convinced that Carbon "pollution" is the greatest theat to humanity I am still very much in favour of clean green efficient energy. In the following chapters of my Opus Magnum I hope to convince you that there is a massive problem which is giving small time swindlers and large public companies the opportunity to get their snouts in the trough.

"Pick on someone your own size Keef"
Ok...no problem :)

Let's start at the start shall we?
Rewind to about ten years ago. I had just moved to a new home in the bush and solar panels were still very expensive.
What to do, what to do??

Once upon a time, in a land far away, lived a man called Keef. With his fair maiden Rapunzel he enjoyed a simple rural idyll beneath the sunny Australian skies.
However, there was a problem. He was bereft of power. He had no energy and was entirely gridless.
Keef was not silly, looking upward to the sky he quickly realised that the answer was simple.... SOLAR POWER.
He rushed out to his nearest supplier and purchased some batteries and a 100Watt solar panel.
He also procured some high efficiency LED lights and accoutrements and he said Let There Be Light and there was light.
SO FAR SO GOOD
Keef and the fair Rapunzel were happy for a while. They enjoyed switching on their new lights and basking in the warmth of their 5 Watt LED lanterns. As hunter gatherers they would occasionally venture out into the surrounding countryside and return with food, cartons of ale and fresh milk for their enjoyment later on.
It quickly became apparent that in order to enjoy this bounty at its pinnacle of excellence some form of refrigeration would be required. This presented a formidable challenge. It was possible to purchase an ancient and rusty beer fridge (gas powered) for a few hundred dollars or a nice shiny new gas fridge for about two thousand dollars. Either of these options would also require the usage of approximately five dollars worth of bottled gas each week.
There was another option
In the local BIG W emporium there was available a shiny new ELECTRIC fridge which boasted of high energy efficiency requiring only 400Kw-hours per year of electricity. "You Beauty" uttered Keef as he flashed his plastic and stowed the fridge in his tucker bag.
Pausing only at the renewable energy emporium to purchase a suitable 240Volt inverter he hurried home to inform the beautiful Rapunzel of his decision. The shiny new fridge was quickly installed and operating and Keef settled back to enjoy a cleansing ale.
By this time it was starting to become dark so Rapunzel reached over and flicked the light switch.
And then…………….Nothing happened.
"Oh" said Keef. It appears that the battery is flat. So they went to bed.
Early the next morning when the sun had risen sufficiently to power up the rustic laptop, satellite dish and modem, Keef began to research ways to boost the supply of solar electricity that needed to be flowing into his batteries.
"Gosh" he said. Solar panels are quite expensive, about ten dollars per watt. What is worse is that a one hundred watt panel only delivers about 150 Kw hours per year so to run fridge, lights and computer Keef will need at least three MORE 100W panels.
"Ouch" said Keef
Fortunately salvation seemed close at hand because having consulted the oracle Google there was a new and fabulous solar invention called the Sunball or maybe it was a Suncube Never mind, this gizmo could deliver unheard of solar power at amazingly low prices. Keef quickly found the Green and Gold Energy website and was mightily impressed by what he saw.

330 W / 660 kWh* 4x5 SunCube™ Solar Appliance:
Model GGE330-14
AU$1,200 inc GST for Australian customers
Availability Internationally and Australia
Shipping size approx 1,050 x 1,300 x 200 mm, weight approx 15 kg
~14 VDC @ ~24 Amps (Model GGE330-14) RAPS unit
Click here to place a no obligation intent to order and to get more detailed information
Learn how to make money from your SunCube investment
“Woo Hooo” said Keef, that is just exactly what I need, and he clicked the intent to order button. He was so excited that he actually thought he had placed an order and he waited anxiously for his wonderful SunCube to arrive. He contacted his local supplier of old fashioned “flatties” which were available with a generous government subsidy and told him to cancel his order because he was going to wait for the wonderful SunCube. Keef told all his friends how lovely the SunCube sounded and advised them all to place their orders. (when Keef gets excited he gets REALLY excited).
Keef went back and had another look at the Green and Gold Energy website and became almost hysterical with excitement. The inventor Mr. Greg Watson was revealing more details on this ground breaking, paradigm shifting, disruptive technology breakthrough.

Greg Watson <greg.watson@...> wrote:

I care little for a Nobel Prize or the academic life. As for money I'm semi retired, 60 this year and any desire to make a lot of money left my system a long time ago. I do however have a great desire to see the way we humans generate power on this small green and blue planet to change for the better. That was why I developed the SunCube and set out to put the power companies out of business. What I sell it for is peanuts as against what I could sell it for. Why? Because I'm a man with a mission and making money or seeking personal glory is not it. I probably have 15 more good years or so and I'm determined to do whatever I have to do to alter the way we humans generate power. I know where you are coming from. My SunCube will totally change forever the way we humans generate electricity. In the beginning no one believed me as to what I had achieved. I had to show, show and show again until finally the penny dropped. Now we are into empirical trials as the technology is too new for there to be any international standards to apply. We are facing the worst challenge the human race has ever faced. If we don't stop Global Warming our way of life will forever change and 10,000's of species will go the way of the Dodo. This is not the time to do and hide but to do and show.
Greg Watson
CEO Green and Gold Energy

Yeah...righto Greg...whatever!
Fast forward....
https://www.todaytonightadelaide.com.au/stories/sun-cube-saga

OK enough of that SunCube bullplop.
Let's have a look at some of the other Green Widgets.

The "New more better Solar Power widgets" has passed its use by date now that respectable high quality solar panels are readily available but just for old times sake I'll mention a couple of the classics.

Sunseeker Energy....... OMG!
Are they still going?
http://sunseekerenergy.ch/
Yes but...
http://www.sunseekerstolemymoney.com/

Geoffrey Taylor was the founding chairman - and he and his family were major shareholders - of Sunseeker Energy (Australasia), a solar energy company that traded on the secondary sharemarket in New Zealand. At its height, the company - whose chief executive was McAskill, the Melbourne businessman sentenced to six months' jail in 2003 - was valued at $NZ18 million and it had a number of related entities. They included Sunseeker Energy (Australia) that operated from Melbourne and the Swiss-registered Sunseeker Energy Holding AG that operated out of Hong Kong, but was listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange in 2009 at a purported 1 billion euros.

In April last year, New Zealand authorities cancelled the public listing of Sunseeker Energy (Australasia) for what it described as ''repeated infringement of the rules'', its ''failure to provide any information to the NZAX market regarding its business or operations'' and the firm's ''own admission … that it is insolvent''.

Oh well :)
Moving right along.

The hot opportunity for scammers these days is energy storage - batteries or wacky gravity energy storage widgets.
Let's have a look at batteries.

Here's what Thomas Edison had to say on the subject back in 1883 (nothing much has changed since then)

The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies. The storage battery is one of those peculiar things which appeals to the imagination, and no more perfect thing could be desired by stock swindlers than that very selfsame thing. … Just as soon as a man gets working on the secondary battery, it brings out his latent capacity for lying.