Gee, this has become a pretty familiar story - a small start up company manufacturing a clean, green energy product that just doesn't stack up in quality and reliability, then goes broke and tarnishes the reputation of clean energy overall:
A similar story happened in 2009 with some Stirling engine solar power plant that might have looked cool, but never worked well. (I see now that even the webpages for the long defunct American Stirling engine solar power company Infinia are gone! I always liked the look of their dishes. There's a photo on one of my posts from 2008.)
Not to mention failure to develop geothermal power in Australia: see this story, and this one.
[Oh, and I nearly forgot - the failure of various wave energy schemes. Frankly, this idea has always seemed to me to be extremely dubious - my gut feeling was always that there is too little movement in any single device riding waves to generate significant enough power to be worth the expense and maintenance.]
The common theme seems to be that they are not crank schemes per se (in that they are systems obviously capable of making energy) - but they need a lot of finesse to make them reliable and economical. Small companies grab the idea but don't have the resources to make it work like it should - and unfortunately, can start to sell the systems before they are proven.
Seems to me that what it all lacks is big companies with the resources to build and test properly the systems before selling them.
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