SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Open Source.com has raised an interesting issue.
With household and municipal scale electricity generation becoming commonplace, it appears that the energy market is about to experience a major technological disruption. Of course, with disruption comes opportunity, and there's already some clear contenders in the field, from Tesla with their cars and batteries, Suntech with their solar panels, to Vestas with their huge turbines.
There's a big caveat with all of this large-scale investment though, and that's contending with the existing centralized power grids and the utilities that manage them. Open source models are a good fit for this new paradigm, with collaboration replacing monopolies and open systems displacing proprietary vendor controls. High quality open source software tools exist already, including the well-supported PowerMatcher suite, but how will this collection of solutions wrest control of the key "last mile" hardware from the hostile and entrenched utilities?
Any suggestions from the SoyLentil team? If we get it right, all of us could become unfeasibly wealthy...
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:46AM
"Skyscraper buildings are dead, along with big cities and mega corporations."
How do you figure that? Look at just about any rural community - all the young folks leave for the big city. I don't understand it either, but it seems to be pretty universal. You do get some folks moving back to small towns, but usually middle-aged or later.
As for mega-corps: As someone very involved with small business, let me just say that "economy of scale" still works. The sheer inefficiency that a large company can get away with, while a competing small company is just scraping by, is just astounding. Economy of scale will always lead to big companies. It's only nimbleness and innovation that let small companies win in their niches.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.