OpenKilowatt^SM Institute

Opensource power – cheaper, cleaner, better!^sm

Note: this document is available as a PDF download here.
Copyright © 2009, OpenKilowatt Institute.

Manifesto

The OpenKilowatt Institute exists to create an online collaborative community, modeled on the software opensource movement, to solve the hardware design/cost issues needed to make kilowatt-scale sustainable power and storage a practical reality. Our big, audacious end goal is to enable every house and office building to be energy net-zero, by driving the installed cost of small-scale renewable “green” energy down to the same or cheaper than coal (about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour, in the U.S.), within a single generation.

Why we must do this

• If you haven't yet read Thomas Friedman's “Hot, Flat, and Crowded,” please do. He brilliantly shows the economics behind energy at both domestic and international scales, that global warming and other pollution consequences really are a crisis, and why it can only be reversed if we enable green energy for the same price as coal, 4 cents per kilowatt-hour (4c/kwh).
  • For example, to meet its on-going growth needs, China adds a gigawatt of generating capacity every two weeks, mostly by building new coal-fired power plants. This has a staggering effect on air pollution, world-wide. And it isn't going to stop until there's a better alternative.

• A major cost impediment to utility-scale solar and wind is the need to build new transmission lines. For example, the cost of transmission from the Sonora desert to Los Angeles for a proposed big CST (concentrator solar thermal) plant there, is TWICE the cost of the plant itself. This strongly indicates that we should look at local, small-size, kilowatt scale power generation instead of utility-size, megawatt scale. It doesn't have to be "decentralized" per se; utilities could easily own a thousand five-kilowatt rooftop installations in aggregate as a 5-megawatt "plant".

• There are thermodynamic arguments that large-scale generation will always be more efficient than small-scale, but that's irrelevant -- all that rooftop sunshine is just going to waste right now. What matters is not efficiency, but COST. If we can deliver green energy for 4c/kwh, installed, then we win. If not, we lose. Simple economics.

• Cities need locally-provided carbon-neutral energy production. Without it, we will bear the cost and waste of energy transportation, and we will be constantly at the mercy of a fragile infrastructure that doubles or squares the risk of “tipping point” behavior as the environment becomes less stable. In cities without significant openspace resources or other special natural resources (like desert on the city limits, or hot springs under the ground), kilowatt-scale power is the only practical answer.

How we can do this

• A revolution in software has been driven over the last decade by a concept called Open Source. There are several definitions, but underlying them all is on-line collaboration by thousands of contributors to a common pool of knowledge and intellectual property, made freely available to all. This is not “selflessness”, it is an expression of confidence that each individual's share of the common good will be greater than the benefits expected, on average, from a proprietary secret-keeping approach. And generally, this confidence has been supported by the industry outcome.

• The book “Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,” by Tapscott and Williams, details example after example of mass collaboration solving problems that would be impossible for smaller groups.  Similarly, “The Wisdom of Crowds” by James Surowiecki shows how aggregating the knowledge of many individuals can produce stunningly effective results.

• Lately there have been a number of articles about "open hardware", an effort to apply the same collaborative techniques to build a body of knowledge and shared IP around hardware designs. These include:
  • Arduino single-board control computer
  • Inexpensive intravenous treatment machine for 3rd-world cholera patients
  • See also web search for "open hardware" or "opensource hardware"

• The heart of the opensource software movement has been a few websites like SourceForge.net, which provide free hosting for these collaborative projects, along with collaboration software and software development tools. Major communities of users and contributors have sprung up around these sites.

• The OpenKilowatt(sm) Institute shall provide similar free services, to build an on-line collaborative community of people dedicated to pooling knowledge and ideas to solve the problems of kilowatt-scale power generation and storage, and actually moving those ideas to reality.

• Of course the Institute can also perform an educational role, helping publicize these issues and making information available to policy makers, and people who want to install such systems.

• The end goal is to have every house and office building be energy-self-sufficient, by using its own rooftop space to cheaply generate at least as much power as it uses.

Why this way

Any discussion of applying opensource to a new area of technology inevitably raises questions about ownership, capitalism, and why anyone in their right mind would give away their ideas to be used by others.  Here are a few reasons why an opensource collaboration can be more effective for this purpose than a for-profit startup:

• No one person has the whole answer. I have good ideas which I think will contribute to solving pieces of the problem. These pieces only become valuable when combined with many other good ideas from many other smart people. I want to see those ideas bear fruit.

• In an opensource collaboration, we can flexibly draw from tens of thousands of people at all levels of expertise in all areas of technology, for as many years as necessary. In contrast, a venture-funded startup could afford to hire only a few dozen experts, and must demand that they produce, correctly across all disciplines, in a very short timeframe, before the money runs out.

• The important thing is that the problem gets solved. We have approximately one generation before "tipping point" behavior occurs in the ecosystem. Letting all the people of that belief work together, for the common good, is more productive than having all those people wringing their hands believing there is nothing they can do.

This document is available as a PDF download here.

Copyright © 2009, OpenKilowatt Institute.  Some rights reserved, pursuant to the
Creative Commons "Attribution Share Alike 3.0" license.
OpenKilowatt, OpenKW, and the “Opensource power” taglines are
service marks of OpenKilowatt Institute.  All rights in these marks are reserved.