Corn Cobs: Fuel of Nightmares
How do you get so far into a project before you even realize that you have such a show-stopper problem? Move fast / fail fast works with software because iteration times are quick and penalty per iteration is low. But just building stuff and hoping it works and then realizing major problems doesn't work so well with real-world stuff. Couldn't they have "workshopped" this with non-functional item to see what the real world roadblocks would have been before a deep investment?This is especially the case in high-risk unproven areas such as cleantech where the solution space is vast and potential problem areas significant. Any problem area can kill a project, so why are we progressing so fast to build first?