Houses Are Expensive. I'll Live Outside

Stupid arguments do not change reality.

I've watched housing move from costing five years of gross annual income to eight years of an annual income in just a few short years. That dramatic rise hasn't stopped people from considering life indoors-- they just realize the neccessity and commit to the expense. One reason is the amortization.

The argument against alternative energy is the expense. While traditional generation has a carbon hit, the upfront dollar costs are cheap. People don't want to spend the upfront costs. But I think the ice is thawing. I was at Costco, and they are selling portable solar arrays for $300. The massive power outtages have given people reason to doubt the constancy of their power supply. Like it or not, people are going off the grid-- either they are choosing energy alternatives or they're getting punted off of the grid when their power supplier fails them. What if there were a way to amortize your alternative energy?

Enter Citizenre. This company is going to home owners with an offer: let Citizenre install a solar array capable of supplying the home with power and let Citizenre charge you for the power coming down from the roof. The homeowner pays a small amount upfront as a deposit. Within 15 years, the cost of the equipment should have been paid off by the homeowner's payments to Citizenre. The equipment has a likely lifespan of 25 years so Citizenre can use those 10 years as their profit margin. In effect, Citizenre becomes a power supplier-- instead of threading 1000 miles of cable that bleed EM into our cells, their power runs 20 feet to a power inverter.

The people behind Citizenre, namely Rob Styler bailed out of California company, Equinox, three years before the Federal Trade Commission shut it down. So, is this like Hill-Murray and Associates for a consumer model of delivering alternative energy? Or could this be the real deal? The good side: regardless how well Citizenre does this, other players can come into the marketplace: without the need for infrastructure, there could be 50 amortized energy players in a market without threat of a market glut. Even if there is a glut, these suppliers can go overseas to Asia and Africa and electrify them one hut at a time.

Nano Technology Update : Nanogenerators

The march of nanotechnology involves building very small mechanisms. According to Sci-fi.com, scientists at the University of Edinburgh have created a motor mechanism for a nanomachine. Last year researchers at the University of Georgia developed minuscule nanogenerators to power the nano world, but this latest unimaginably small machine — about 80,000 times thinner than the thickness of a human hair — runs on its own power.

The next challenge will be to load these with logic-- with a computer or similar means of directing nanomachines. One thought: leave them dumb. Give them to ability to recieve and act on external directions then transmit directions via radio waves, lasers or similar. Then the computer sending the messages could work from a theoretical model of where the nanobots are and what they should be doing and update the actions so that many nanobots could work in tandem.

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