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Cleantech: Cool Earth Solar Balloon

One of the great things about the cleantech boom of recent years, like with the information technology boom of years past, is the number of cool ideas being flown out there as inventors and entrepenneurs come out of the wood work to try to capitalize on the growing market.  Some of the ideas are decidedly uncool, of course, one of the pitfalls for investors who aren't familiar with the lay of the land but still want to get in on the boom, but it seems like with cleantech and alternative energy it is getting easier to pick out the speculators and charlatans from those who something serious to offer.

Aptly named Cool Earth Solar seems to be one of the latter, promoting a new balloon-based solar concentrator package for grid-level energy generation.  Combining existing technology with an inexpensive manufacturing and deployment process, Cool Earth Solar promises an energy package that is competitive with natural gas power plants in price and output.

The downside to their offering is that they're not looking to sell to consumers and third parties.  Though the deployment would seem to be scalable from rather modest installations to large-scale arrays, the company has elected to position itself as a producer of alternatives to our current grid providers.  Smart, in many ways, because that's where most of the money is right now in solar.  From concentrator farms in the American southwest to big parking-lot sized arrays for Google or Wal-Mart, the trend right now seems to be in replacing or supplanting big power plants, rather than angling for the microgeneration market. 

Microgeneration has the potential to be extremely transformative, one of the reasons why many of the solar providers are being lured away from it; the big energy companies see the potential for their being cut out of the loop in the future of energy, and they would rather maintain their current position than be rendered obsolete by an effective micro solution.  From an alternative business standpoint, microgeneration is also a likely very volatile and uncertain market even now.  A competitive price point, especially in an environment of low consumer confidence, might not be enough to promote enough consumer interest to make the company viable.

Focusing on the grid-level provides another option, and that is of high altitude solar collection.  A compromise between ground-based arrays, with their near horizon and susceptibility to cloud cover and orbital solar installations, with the expense of installation and difficulty in transmitting power to the ground, a high altitude lighter-than-air solar collection mechanism could provide for enery needs cheaply and effectively.  Certainly one of the very exciting possibilities that the cleantech boom is providing.