July 2008
Deep thinking on infrastructure makes normal life seem weird.
Working on infrastructure. Seriously putting some dents in my head, looking at the systems around me right now keeping me cosy, wondering how on earth it all works.
Fundamental realization - most infrastructure was designed by and for cold countries. With tons of consistent solar energy you can do a whole new class of things and that is really worthwhile.
But I need a lab and some time.
Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems
Energy in Nature and Society is a systematic and exhaustive analysis of all the major energy sources, storages, flows, and conversions that have shaped the evolution of the biosphere and civilization. Vaclav Smil uses fundamental unifying metrics (most notably for power density and energy intensity) to provide an integrated framework for analyzing all segments of energetics (the study of energy flows and their transformations). The book explores not only planetary energetics (such as solar radiation and geomorphic processes) and bioenergetics (photosynthesis, for example) but also human energetics (such as metabolism and thermoregulation), tracing them from hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies through modern-day industrial civilization. Included are chapters on heterotrophic conversions, traditional agriculture, preindustrial complexification, fossil fuels, fossil-fueled civilization, the energetics of food, and the implications of energetics for the environment. The book concludes with an examination of general patterns, trends, and socioeconomic considerations of energy use today, looking at correlations between energy and value, energy and the economy, energy and quality of life, and energy futures.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~vsmil/complete_booklist.html
Looks like I’ve got some reading to do later this year.
The age of cheap solar energy - now, to be precise.
Energy is about to become absurdly cheap at least during daylight hours in sunny areas of the planet.
http://nanosolar.com is retailing panels (maybe a gigawatt a year) for $1 per watt. Their production cost is 30 cents per watt of panel capacity. Konarka claims 10 cents per watt production costs (confirmed here) and are expecting to begin mass production in a year or two.
So what does this mean in terms of electricity supply? Simply put, it means that in some applications, solar power’s real cost is about half that of a coal fired power plant today and it’s only going to get cheaper. We’re likely to see solar displace nearly all of the world’s coal plants within 20 years, cutting CO2 emissions by 40%.
Would you like to see the numbers?
Let’s look at the optimal case: direct drive solar panels being sold at the around the cost of manufacture. Direct drive simply means there are no batteries or chargers in the system: the devices being powered are directly connected to the solar panels, so there is very little waste an no additional system costs. This is the sort of setup you might see in a solar powered factory that only runs in daylight hours. The low profit margin is typical of commodity goods like paper or corn. A very large global solar market will tend to push prices down, but perhaps not this close to manufacturing cost. But it does tell us how much it really costs to do, so it’s a good place to start thinking about the numbers.
So how much will power cost in that configuration?
$0.30 per watt of panels means $300 for 1 kilowatt of panels.
20 years of panel life * 365 days per year * 8 hours a day of sun = 58400 hours of electricity generated by the panels over their service lifetime
cost per kilowatt per hour = $300 / 58400 = 0.51 cents per kilowatt hour
Right now, the cheapest coal power in America costs 4.63 cents per kilowatt hour. In this configuration, solar power is 1/8th of the cost of grid power from coal plants.
Now this is not an apples to apples comparison. Our notional power plant is sitting in the middle of a desert area directly driving machines which only need to run in daylight. There are no grid costs, staffing costs, costs-of-borrowing or other factors calculated in. We have not accounted for clouds. But even when you add those factors back in, the conclusion is the same: in real terms, even when you factor in all of those costs, solar power is likely to produce power at about half the cost of the cheapest coal-fired power plants.
The implication is clear: the global power economy is in the early stages of a shift as profound as the shift when gasoline began to be widely used. With new battery technology expected in the near future the issues around powering systems at night and handling spikes in demand my begin to be solved, resulting in a complete green power revolution.
Outsourced back yard food gardening
Guy comes round to your house, grows your vegetables, and gives them to you. There’s a name for this, and I’m trying to remember it…
Open Innovation… bang bang bang bang bang
There’s just no way around it - patent is broken. I’m writing up a set of docs right now, and it’s clear that trying to tease apart what might have been patented before by other people, what’s common knowledge, and what’s potentially material for a patent pool is just impossible. It’s a question that, in the real world, probably costs $50,000 or $100,000 to answer definitively: patent lawyers and a court case, and whatever’s seen as true at the end of any appeals process is true. For that country.
In short, it’s all a matter of legal opinion, of judicial rather than technical reality.
That way lies madness.
This inherent paradox: that the GPL rests on the control of code given by copyright bites us in the ass hard on patent - patent’s so utterly obnoxious compared to copyright that if you try and base an open IP effort in patent law, the result is so expensive and top heavy that it’s hard to imagine it remaining open in any significant way at the end of the day. Every patch of ground you want to defend as open in a GPL-style fashion costs you $20,000, vs $0 for opening it in a public domain style, which leaves no defense to “parasitic patents” which use the work in the open pool and return nothing to it.
Fundamental problem: copyright doesn’t cover *how* - doesn’t protect ideas, only expressions. Patents (can) protect ideas, but they’re expensive and uncertain: comparing expressions to see if they are equivalent is easier than comparing ideas to see if they are equivalent, and that leads to an entire architecture for trying to formalize the expression of ideas in a way which makes it feasible to crunch them through a legal process that looks for overlaps.
In short, these systems are really unsuited to the rapidly moving open innovation environment in hardware. Copyright just doesn’t reach everything, and patents are too heavy. Without either mechanism applying, all that’s left is public domain and publish as fast as possible to stop some heavy corporate player patenting the hell out of everything around a public disclosure.
The GPL works because of it’s replicating nature: you place your work under it, and everybody who wants to modify your work for their purposes has to abide by your wishes - the rule of copyright is the origin of that power, to require your downstream users to behave a certain way. What we really want for open innovation at the bottom is freedom to continue to innovate, to change the game, without the fear of aggressive patents by corporate entities removing our freedom to continue innovating.
It’s not a big problem now, but if we don’t address it, in the long run we could see the same kind of bloodletting we see in the world of medicine and drug design, where millions of people die because patents empower drug companies to keep prices artificially high.
And how do we protect the capital which allows people to spend years working on a drug, or on a solution? How do we make it profitable to solve humanities basic problems…
I think we need to consider punching a hole in the international patent regime for bottom of the pyramid work - a statement of professional ethics which requires companies not to abuse patents and then we get NGOs and governments to require companies they buy BOP products and services from to be signatories to that agreement. I don’t know what that agreement should say, but without it, this whole field is like juggling knives - we haven’t had a serious crisis yet, but it’s only a matter of time until somebody gets seriously screwed.
Noooo - it burns, it burns
from http://twitpic.com/54k4 (twitter from Golden Phoenix)
Smari said, on sight, “Hahahahaha New Headquarters?”
We just hit critical mass
I can’t put it into words, but something happened today, stepped over some kind of threshold, hit critical mass.
Now it goes boom, this thing we’ve been building - a perspective, a view on life, a housing technology, a science of infrastructure… a plan to fix the world, which is not broken.
If you never read it, check you this: Winning the Long Peace. Now imagine doing that, but with no government. That’s Global Swadeshi in a nutshell: fix the world through cooperation, to the disadvantage of none, as Buckminster Fuller once said.
Good night.
An anti-patent-abuse appropriate technology political bloc?
As I look at all these rocket scientists struggling to navigate the horrific waters of patent law and worst practices, I’m wondering… why has the Sacred Oath gone out of fashion?
Like, really, what this comes down to is three principles which really ought to be sworn in blood by anybody doing this kind of work.
1> I will not permit any human being to be deprived of live-giving technology by the profit motive.
2> Any works that I patent I will make available to others who are engaged in humanitarian activity for free, except where this would breach other contractual responsibilities.
3> I will not use patent law to slow the pace of innovation or service delivery to the needy under any circumstances.
I think that if I could get everybody I’m doing business with to swear some version of these oaths in a serious fashion, my life would be enormously easier. I think I know a lot of other people who feel the same way.
Maybe this needs to be part of the Global Swadeshi movement, or its own thing, a sort of voluntary code of ethics to guide us where the horrific murk of international law leaves us with little support.
Furthermore, I think that if we got a few hundred people behind this, as a bloc, we could shame companies who were violating fair practices with patent and copyright in the developing world, at least in the burgeoning appropriate infrastructure for the poorest area. The reason we cannot do this with open publishing alone is that things which have not been explicitly published may well become vulnerable to patents - a small innovation becomes patented, and now nobody else in the field can use it without exposing themselves to patent liability.
A large group of allied appropriate technology groups with a common stance on that kind of behavior could probably public-relations-bomb any company trying to leech from the open pool in this way as a way of ensuring that appropriate technology remains Free As In Speech or at least is licensed irrevocably as Free As In Beer for non-profits and small, local commercial enterprises.
The last thing that we want is a patent bloodbath at the bottom of the pyramid: people are going to die if that happens. Possibly hundreds of thousands to tens of millions, given a few years. We need to roundly nip this in the bud, keep the patent trolls off our back, and more importantly, the backs of the poor.
On facing Dr. Horrible.
Dr. Horrible is a really, really perfectly nerdy web TV show by the brains behind Buffy and Firefly/Serenity. For reasons that I’m foolishly going to try to explain, it hit me like a bag of hammers.
Here’s Dr. Horrible’s problem. He wants the world to be a better place, and he’s willing to kill people to make it happen. Not just anybody, but some people. This more or less defines him as a villain.
Now this is not a trivial point. Gandhi famously said “There are many causes I am willing to die for. There is not a single one I am willing to kill for.” This is a very clear statement of ahimsa - non-violence, but really the word is more profound than that - an inherent non-harming as a quality of being. To use the english phrase “wouldn’t hurt a fly” literally - this is ahimsa.
Unfortunately, for all my aspirations, I’m more like this guy:
Dr. Horrible really brings this into sharp focus: am I willing to, say, kill to protect people. I have to look at myself and conclude that, yes, I am. I’m nowhere near the level of evolution where the killing response is replaced by universal consideration for the life of any being as sacred. Early on in my career I worked on military training software, and if you put a gun in my hand in a crisis, I would not put it down. I don’t know that I could use it, but odds-are that my instincts would not prevent me from using it.
Not a small thing to admit for a guy running a website called Global Swadeshi.
So is Dr. Horrible right? Or Gandhi? Krishna councils Arjuna to fight, to kill, to win. Gandhi councils people to be beaten-unto-death in the streets rather than retaliate. There is no consistency, times change.
Suppose Gandhi had access to the modern telecoms infrastructure - to the internet. This advert sums up that reality better than anything I’ve ever seen.
It’s not about killing or not killing to Arjuna. It’s about whether one hates as one kills, or whether one can kill with full consciousness of what is being done. This is a deadly middle path: to pick up the rifle and to kill god is essentially the council of the Mahabarata - to understand the status and nature of your opponents as divine beings, as incarnate god - and to kill them anyway.
“I am become death, destroyer of worlds” as Krishna, and then Oppenheimer, said.
Again, I can’t imagine where you have to be to have that level of clarity - to see people as they are, fully human and fully divine, and still to pull the trigger. I think I’d better stay far away from battlefields in the physical until I’ve had another forty years to meditate.
the best I can do
“you will live and die on this farm, and you will never go hungry. but your kids are going to the stars.”