A Brief, Brief Update

Engineering is well under way on the proof-of-concept. We have a Preliminary Design Review coming up, in which we will be presenting the penultimate designs for the receiver, the thermal storage, and the engine/generator. After that, combined efforts should create the thermal transport system and the sensor/controls/reporting systems. We have learned one thing: power plants are very complicated. Preliminary engineering is likely to still take a few more months, sadly, given our very busy schedules.

We will, additionally, be reaching for the MIT IDEAS and MIT $100K competitions, which we hope will give us seed money. For the moment, we're reaching into our own pockets to build the proof-of-concept, which will become a major testing platform and data generator for us, allowing us to start chasing venture capital (as, hopefully, we will have shown the tech to be viable and competitive).

We've also picked up a new team member (though not owning partner) named Mikael, who is our construction consultant, and will be helping us put the darned thing together when we finally design/build/buy all the parts we need. If all goes well (ha), it will be up and running during the spring, when the sun starts coming out, and we will have a few weeks to collect enough data to make our IDEAS and $100K competitions seriously professional. And then, who knows! We'll hopefully take our winnings and spend them on summer engineering interns to make a larger-scale prototype of the final product. If we're really, really clever, we should be able to get away with asking for pretty small amounts of VC money late in the process, which should mean that we give away as little equity as possible.

So don't lose hope yet. It was born a little premature, but this startup's in a very good incubator right now.

--Erik