“Children today don’t have enough metaphors for path dependence.” said Houghton Mifflin publisher Mike Berkenbush. “We felt that the Concentrating Solar Power industry as a whole was the best introduction to how aesthetically and thermodynamically elegant engineering constructs pursued in the best of faith by affectionate, invested visionaries would be inevitably overtaken, sidelined, and forgotten by purveyors of low-cost commodity technology.”

The interviews quite clearly suggest that the industry is not only an outlier, but truly one of a kind. Lola Castanova from BNY Mellon summarizes the situation well: “I’d say of the solar transaction flow-of-funds we quarterback here, about 12% of them go off without a hitch. This compares to our global all-industry benchmark of about 99.3%. We’ve never seen anything like it…and that benchmark includes industries such as ticket-scalping, puppetry, and Cutco Knives.”

In a synthetic discovery broadly compared to the work of Galloway and Leach, NREL investigators tracing energy and capital flows between renewable energy systems, those systems’ project finance assumptions via primary-contracted-offtakers, the primary clients of those offtakers, and, in turn, the primary consumers of those offtakers, have discovered a previously uncharacterized, enclosed, and self-sustaining sunlight-to electricity-to-money-to bros-to-data-to-grift/crypto-to-porn-to-bros-to money-to light-to-electricity ecosystem that is nearly self sustaining without external reference or input and which may soon overtake photosynthesis and geotechnical processes in terms of overall magnitude of energy transfer in Earth’s biosphere.