On Distributed Energy

The Future Loometh

Which is threatening, to say the least. Follow that with this:

With major pointers toward the future – I find the carbon-fibre car thing particularly interesting on account of being particulary interested the notion of Bamboo Apteras… light-weight, locally-sourced, open-source motors. The VW for for the age of Favela Chic.

Distributed power is the thing… someone’s rolling out little solar stations in off-grid Haiti.

Which is pretty cool. Except that they say “We are not competing with the utility, we’re complementing them, so we’re trying to service people who are not currently reached by EDH—they love the fact that we’re going into dark areas and getting people used to paying for electricity”

No, no, no fucking no, no, no, no, no. Jesus, it sounds like they think they’re training cattle. No. People getting used to paying some fucking utility for electricity is the fucking OPPOSITE of what we should be doing. People should be getting used to never paying for electricity. People should be specifically aiming towards systems where nobody ever has to pay for anything.

I’m not talking about stealing it (which is more or less what happens now), I’m talking about P2P everything… nothing coming from centralised, optimised-for-scarcity sources.

ps: Here’s a video of a not-that-massive, solar-still that’s capaable of purifying 30,000 gallons of water a day

as well as electricity and satellite comms. All locked up with patents, and each unit costing $1.2M, which as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to murder. Doing with to the fledgling distributed-energy industry what big pharma has done to medicine.

“Intellectual Property” is a society-level, mental-illness that needs to be killed off as quickly as possible, and don’t tell me “people wouldn’t invent things if it wasn’t for IP”, because that’s just shit. Most R&D is public/state-funded anyway.