Announcing a Sustainable Energy Startup: Invest Now!

The Daily Sceptic does not usually endorse commercial or investment opportunities, but this one is an exception. It’s simply too good to miss. At last, the global energy crisis has a credible, sustainable solution.

The radical new technology – an ingenious fusion of biochemistry and physics – has the capacity to provide zero-emission locomotive as well as static energy for the entire planet at only 0.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. I kid you not. It’s the real deal. You can trust me on this.

After almost a decade of intensive research at the gleaming laboratories of the Grand Academy of Lagardo, conducted in the greatest secrecy (we didn’t want the Chinese stealing the technology), we are at last ready to go public. Within less than a decade, when the first Small Modular Uplift Generator rolls off the production line at our Terafactory (formerly known as Texas) to the chink of decarbonised champagne glasses, all existing forms of energy generation and supply will have become entirely redundant overnight.

His Majesty’s Government, via the Sustainable Transition Unlimited Potential Industrial Development fund administered by the Department of Energy and Net Zero, provided the initial $4 billion in seed capital to get this radical and exciting new technology market-ready.

Inflation-Reduction-Act funding of $100 billion a year has been guaranteed by the U.S. Treasury. The Bill Gates Foundation has chipped in $40 billion. Elon Musk has taken a 3% stake for $50 billion. But we don’t want this to be an exclusively big-bucks project. Here, then, is your chance to get some penny shares while they are still affordable.

Market cap of the We Intend ZerO corporation is already well above $1.5 trillion. We are now at last permitted to go public, for we have just been notified that we will be listed next week on NASDAQ under the tetragrammaton WIZO. Readers of the Daily Sceptic are the first to know. We are letting you in on the ground floor. You’ll thank me, you really will.

Recently one of my noble friends, Lord Swift of Wetwang, sent his learned clerk, Mr. Gulliver, to the Grand Academy to report on our research, conducted under the able direction of Professor Sir Gradely Champion, PhD (Oxon.), FRS:

The first man I saw [the Professor] was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt and skin were all of the same colour. He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in warm, inclement summers. He told me he did not doubt, in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was very low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers”. I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.

Now, you may think this is all a joke. How can one get two sunshines’ worth of energy out of only one sunshine and a cucumber? Doesn’t that violate the laws of thermodynamics? Isn’t it a perpetual motion machine? Doing the sums on the back of an envelope, it looks to me, Monckton, as though you’re saying you could get seeds from the first cucumber and plant them and then get two sunshines’ worth of energy out of each new cucumber. Surely that’s impossible?

We often hear this from investors at first. But, as the Professor explains in his peer-reviewed paper on the subject, the law of physics that you can’t get summat from nowt (or, as he colourfully puts it, “nowt for nowt and b*gger all for sixpence”) simply does not apply where one is using crossover tech between the radiative physics of sunlight and the physical biochemistry of chlorophyll fluorescence in photosynthesis. It’s all a matter of the metabolic pathways, as every schoolboy knows. I mean, try it for yourself.

As head of marketing for WIZO, I can assure you that our business model is identical to that of many previous startups that achieved major market caps. Take Arrival, an exciting British startup of 2021. The brilliant idea behind Arrival was that White Van Man, with his mullet, his fake gold chain, his baggy Chinese Levi knockoffs and his Converse All-Stars, had not yet joined the mass movement towards Net Zero and ought to be brought into line.

So Arrival had what you can see was an idea almost as brilliant as ours. Its directors decided that it should use reliable, century-old technology for powering milk-floats with electricity, fitting white vans not with real engines but with enormous, heavy batteries whose sheer weight would help to improve the van’s grip on Britain’s slippery roads – an important health and safety improvement given White Van Man’s reputation for bad driving.

The first, crucial step in this field of research, of course, is to get AU to generate a shiny-looking image of what the finished product might look line. Arrival did this beautifully, as you can see, though perhaps they might have added a little color:

ARRIVAL has departed, in a very real sense

Next, the marketing team planted a series of stories in willing news media. Here are a few:

March 2021: ‘Federal policies, local production – Arrival is meeting the American moment‘
April 2021: ‘Mindful sustainability – for a clean, circular and equitable future‘
July 2021: ‘Making Safety Equitable‘
July 2021: ‘Anaheim PTO partners with Arrival to secure a $2 million Clean Vehicle Grant‘
August 2021: ‘Arrival’s autonomous driving technology achieves major AU advancement‘
August 2021: ‘Arrival co-developing its Automotive Open Data Platform with Microsoft‘
October 2021: ‘UPS and DP World delivering world-first Electric vehicles charged using off-grid solar power at Expo 2020 Dubai‘
October 2021: ‘Arrival hand-picked by UK Government to showcase at exclusive Global Investment Summit in London‘
November 2021: ‘Arrival aims to transform fleet servicing with Global Service Network Programme‘
December 2021: ‘Arrival reveals its first Electric Car designed to transform the global ride-hailing industry‘
December 2021: ‘Arrival begins proving ground trials of its electric Bus‘
May 2022: ‘Arrival achieves EU bus certification milestone‘
June 2022: ‘Arrival produces first production verification van in Microfactory‘

What a roaring success! By this stage, Arrival’s market cap was $15 billion. It had not sold a single vehicle, but who needs to, these days? That business model is way out of date.

By January 2023, it became plain that, because Arrival had not yet adopted WIZO’s Small Modular Uplift Generators, it was not going to be able to compete in the ever-more-competitive market for electric buggies. From then on, the headlines were different in tone:

January 2023: ‘EV company Arrival to cut workforce by 50% in third restructuring effort‘
February 2023: ‘Arrival announces a $50 million equity capital commitment and exchanges $121.9 million of debt for equity‘
March 2023: ‘Arrival announces $300 million equity financing line and provides 2023 outlook‘
April 2023: ‘Arrival advances U.S. commercialisation plans through business combination with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp‘
May 2023: ‘Arrival reports first quarter 2023 business update‘
June 2023: ‘Arrival to convert Antara’s $20 million loan into equity‘
July 2023: ‘Arrival and Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp. agreed to terminate business combination agreement‘
July 2023: ‘Nasdaq grants Arrival required extension to file its annual report on Form 20-F‘
August 2023: ‘Arrival to report second-quarter 2023 business updates in early September 2023‘
September 2023: ‘Arrival’s secured bridge financing accelerated and terminated‘
September 2023: ‘Arrival reaches agreement with lender on exit fee‘
November 2023: ‘Notice of delisting or failure to satisfy a continued listing rule or standard‘
January 2024: ‘Arrival receives Nasdaq notification of non-compliance with listing rules 5250(c)(2) and 5620(a)‘
January 2024: ‘3.8 times around the Earth. Van trials 2023 results‘
January 2024: ‘EV maker Arrival’s shares slump on Nasdaq delisting notice‘
February 2024: ‘Electric van maker Arrival calls in administrator for U.K. arm‘

By this stage, you may well have deduced that Arrival was an invention, complete with its own bogus website.

Unfortunately, like so many other gee-whiz startups in the Clean Green Circular Mindful Ongoing Sustainable Equitable Crossover Meeting-the-Moment Transformative Open-Data Modular Showcase Global Energy Transition Synergy Partnership Sector, Arrival was a genuine attempt at a corporation. Like far too many others of its kind, from Solyndra via Virgin Hyperloop One to Britishvolt, Arrival gobbled up billions and spat out nothing before disappearing up its own tailpipe. Just another example of Lomborg’s Law: green investment is neither green nor an investment.

But WIZO is different. It really is. Truly. Cross my fingers and hope to get away with it. Let me end with the statutory warning before you send me your very large check: “Investments can go up, and up, and up, as well as up.”

This article was first published by Watts Up With That?