What I find really intriguing about this is Thiel's participation - it's one thing to get funding from Khosla, who is a cleantech cheerleader, it's really amazing to get funding from Thiel, who is a cleanteach skeptic.
If that includes Peter Thiel then I'm all for it.
Him being a skeptic of clean tech is a validation of sorts, you can bet that this kind of money isn't thrown around likely and that they had the basic physics checked before the investment. If someone would have been able to raise serious practical doubt about the feasibility then likely there would have been no announcement today. Yes, there is still risk, and there are likely lots of unknown factors. But this is technology development. I'm pretty sure the world will be at their feet if they manage to get the device into production at scale, no matter who the investors were.
And names like Thiel, Gates and Khosla certainly don't hurt.
And for the record, silly rhetoric about boots on the backs of the taxpayer is completely out of place in an article where he should be pimping his investment. It does make it look like he invested for negative sentiment towards the gov't rather than positive sentiment towards the company.