There once was a man named Eugene
Who thought that 5G was in the vaccine.
But a friend of his said,
"You should quickly instead
Get the facts about COVID-19!"
Danielle Fong is an ex-child prodigy, self-schooled and home-schooled, who founded LightSail Energy in San Francisco (which failed), and one who I periodically Google after to find what she may be doing now-- she is the sort of person who can turn her hand to anything, unquestionably a genius, who used to work mostly at writing software (but never talks about it-- seemingly no love for software). However Ms. Fong definitely possesses plenty of the requisite cleverness which makes programming easy to do.
ANYWAY-- I googled her name as I do every once in a while, and the above limerick popped up on a posting in one of her multiple Twitter personae.
Note to self: LightSail was based upon a great idea for using compressed air as an energy storage technique, called generically CAES (Compressed Air Energy Storage). The "unique, patent-able part" that LightSail attempted to develop, had to do with *also* storing the heat that gaseous compression brings, to aid the efficiency of the process of converting compressed air back to kinetic energy when decompressing the gas, thence producing electricity.
I suspect that one big issue is the fact that increasing entropy inevitably results in "too much" loss of the stored heat over time. "Too much loss" or too much complexity in storage/recovery of heat, when/if passive insulation turned out to be not good enough to "keep the heat". Perhaps there is some answer in controlled-but-tiny added complexity: For example, use additional passive solar energy to keep the stored heat "hot". OR use a "better" storage medium than water... OR convert the heat immediately into some sort of potential energy-- lift heavy weights or spin large flywheels whose weight can be progressively increased... OR ??...
There is something of potential value embedded in there, somewhere, I firmly believe. Of course, converting that heat-derived potential energy back to heat to achieve CAES decompression efficiency buys back much complexity-- suddenly your round trip has more complexity and mechanical efficiency issues than you bargained for, by a wide country mile.
OTOH and by contrast, the increasing capacity and efficiency of electric battery technology is making simple battery-based energy storage "tougher to beat". There is new research and results on Iron/Air batteries for example, not to mention that batteries in general store energy directly as electricity... CAES of course needs to hook generators up to the air decompression process, to make electricity from decompressing compressed air. "Small" details like that can make all the difference in an invention being successful or not.