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Thanks, Lawry,
That was a scarry read. Leaves me with the feeling that we really have to
reduce world population. The notion that we are going to extract any more from
the already pillaged single resource begs the question, What will remain for
the next generations? That there is a shortage of labour hardly entered into my
concerns. Admittedly, most of this activity will be revised as interests in
other ventures for alternate energies develop. But until such time, with
increasing populations and new markets blooming, let's hope that these
alternate energies take shape quickly.
Recently I read about two new inventions, by the same fellow who brought the
"Segway" to those interested. One was a generator, fully portable and capable
of producing enough energy for a small village. The other was a water purifier,
capable of cleaning even raw sewage, at a volume of 1000 litres/day.
Natalia
***********************************************
Segway creator unveils his next act
Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and
electricity to the world's poor.
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large
February 16, 2006: 2:06 PM EST
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San Francisco (Business 2.0) - Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the
Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion
people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated
1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for
the world-and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.
To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a
washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural
villages.
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"Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you
just gave people clean water," says Kamen. "The water purifier makes 1,000
liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power
generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns."
Light in the darkness
Kamen is not alone in his quest. He's been joined by Iqbal Quadir, the founder
of Grameen Phone, the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh. Last year,
Quadir took prototypes of Kamen's power machines to two villages in his home
country for a six-month field trial. That trial, which ended last September,
sold Quadir on the technology.
So much so in fact that Quadir's startup, Cambridge, Mass.-based Emergence
Energy, is negotiating with Kamen's Deka Research and Development to license
the technology. Quadir then hopes to raise $30 million in venture capital to
start producing the power machines. (With the exception of the Segway, which
Kamen's own company sold, Kamen has typically licensed his inventions to
others.)
The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung.
Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound
like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts
it, "If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime."
A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across
Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a
simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their
leisure times.
Entrepreneurial power
The real invention here, though, may be the economic model that Kamen and
Quadir hope to use to distribute the machines. It is fashioned after Grameen
Phone's business, where village entrepreneurs (mostly women) are given
micro-loans to purchase a cell phone and service. The women, in turn, charge
other villagers to make calls.
"We have 200,000 rural entrepreneurs who are selling telephone services in
their communities," notes Quadir. "The vision is to replicate that with
electricity."
During the test in Bangladesh, Kamen's Stirling machines created three
entrepreneurs in each village: one to run the machine and sell the electricity,
one to collect dung from local farmers and sell it to the first entrepreneur,
and a third to lease out light bulbs (and presumably, in the future, other
appliances) to the villagers.
Kamen thinks the same approach can work with his water-cleaning machine, which
he calls the Slingshot. While the Slingshot wasn't part of Quadir's trial in
Bangladesh, Kamen thinks it can be distributed the same way. "In the 21st
century, water will be delivered by an entrepreneur," he predicts.
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and
separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining
sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power
machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.
Compared to building big power and water plants, Kamen's approach has the
virtue of simplicity. He even created an instruction sheet to go with each
Slingshot. It contains one step: Just add water, any water. Step two might be:
add an entrepreneur.
"Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,"
says Kamen. "You don't need any -ologists. You don't need any building permits,
bribery, or bureaucracies."
The price of freedom
Still, even if some of the technical challenges have been solved ("I know the
technology works and I'd fall on my sword to prove it," insists Kamen), the
economic challenges still loom.
Kamen's goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That's a
far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.
Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by
a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that
distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business -- he also
thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt
power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to
place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because
then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.
"Isn't that better for democracy?" Quadir asks. "We see a shortage of democracy
in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of
people, you will foster real democracy."
----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence de Bivort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2006 6:32 AM
Subject: [Futurework] Global industrial patterns
| Greetings, everyone,
|
| There is a fascinating article in today's IHT that describes the global
| interdependence of heavy industry for materiel, and also the ease with which
| industry now turns to sources around the world. It is not just about labor
| demands and outsourcing.
|
| The URL is: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/16/business/shortage.php
|
| Well worth the read.
|
| Best regards to all,
| Lawry
|
| _______________________________________________
| Futurework mailing list
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| http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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