Most of the time, this blog focuses on big listed companies. And yet, whilst they tend to be the most relevant to alternative energy investors, in so doing we are missing out on something crucial; innovative small companies that just might one day deliver the game-changing invention that will BE BIG. It may be a cliche, but my admittedly partial anecodatal evidence is that when alt. e. companies become large blue chips, the corporate culture takes over and the innovation goes out of the window. The question is why?

Arguably, because they have a much greater fear of failure. Silly really, when if you've read Why most things fail: evolution, extinction and economics by Paul Ormerod, you understand that failure is the natural order not only of the economy but of the biosphere. You have to budget for failure to succeed. Roughly 99.8% of all species and companies that have ever existed do not do so today. But that's ok because we have superfecundity - as Eric Beinhocker argued in a similarly excellent book, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics, i.e. a surplus of players in the biosphere and the marketplace who are destined to fail but in so doing provide competition, and a learning mechanism for the survivors.

So after that rather long introduction, I'd like to introduce you to three players who have emerged into the light over the last few weeks, who have very novel innovations to their name.

First of all, Broadstar Wind Systems who have developed a turbine that looks like it fell off the back of a paddle steamer called the Aerocam.

This is potentially exciting not only for the aesthetics (!), or even for the lower avian mortality rates, but more seriously because  Broadstar believe they can deliver this technology at an overnight capital installation cost of $1 per watt - roughly where it was a few years ago before the ramp up in steel prices, construction costs and various supply constraints kicked in. I've tried squinting at the power curve (can't they and everyone else just give us the underlying numbers so we can overlay them with others on the same chart?) on this machine compared to a conventional horizontal axis turbine with inconclusive results - you may do better. It has the added advantage of requiring shorter towers and a possibility to infill on existing wind farm sites.  All that' s quite exciting, novel and still has a high risk of failure because as far as I can see, there is as yet, no working example, displayed on their website.

Here's another wind turbine which is vertical axis - quiet revolution - and beautiful to behold.

On the face of it, it looks pretty expensive but that's not a reason for it not to succeed, just look at Ferrari. If you fancy a trip to a less desirable corner of London some time - Elephant and Castle - you can see one of these perched on top of a block of flats at the opposite end to a conventional Proven wind turbine and draw your own conclusions on the horizontal axis versus vertical axis wind turbine debate.

Finally, Raw Solar. Students at the Masachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with this;