Excellent thread, Kyle. Don’t worry about length- some of these threads wander all over the solar system.

I like the idea of the FFS grant(s) to LPP to keep things straight regarding equity. As for risk, nothing succeeds like success. We need to target the Twenteens- those in high school and only a few years out in order to get a true viral campaign. Truly viral means spending little to nothing on promotion, since each of these early adopters would spread the word to an overall average of hopefully at least 2 more people. Some may get 1 or none to look us over, some may get 100 or more. As long as the overall average is 1.0 or higher, the campaign is viral.

Colleges and universities are the best places to seed viral movements, due to the localized society and the physics departments. And these societies’ members are in touch with those of other schools. This is how FaceBook got started. The viral campaign would have two major purposes, imo-

1. Get every candidate in the 2010 and 2012 elections to justify his/her energy positions and policies due to recognition of a wildly spreading public movement.

2. Bring in a manufacturer with the balls to invest $20M in a license and perhaps $100M total across a year or three (probably more counting engineering the X-ray converter) for an as-yet unproven technology. In short, a visionary who leads a visionary board of directors. But if we get one, we need no VC vultures polluting the culture.

3. Get manufacturing trade journals buzzing about how to fabricate all the parts and sub-assemblies, and integrating the modules into companies, machines such as boilers and ovens, and local transformer yards. Urban planning rags could discuss how a few FFs in their jurisdiction would begin healing their economies. And helping with the political environment at the NRC.

Two books about this are Viral Loop (viralloop.com) and The Tipping Point. I recommend them in that order because Tipping Point takes wayyy too many pages for the amount of useful information in it.

My votes for the authority figures would be Rezwan and Aaron, as if they weren’t busy enough already.

So we need to seed at least one viral message (there are several that we could use in a rolling barrage) that FF is clean, cost-effective, will your university be the first to confirm Eric’s results? Do your energy policies reflect (our) reality? If not, please elaborate in detail… and we need to get literally almost everybody figuring out how to integrate FF into their local grid, and be in the first 100 municipalities to do it.

As for producing 20 million units per year, I’ve worked in several auto plants over the years. As long as our supplier networks can produce 400 million collector panels for the X-ray converter per year, there should be no major problem with that much production. Imho, the biggest single problem is politics.