I’m someone that puts his brain where his mouth is, meaning that I actively try to work to address problems that I talk about. One of these days I’m going to do comprehensive posts about everything I’m involved with from health care to energy to food production to economic modeling, there may be some other stuff I don’t remember now. I’ve been wanting to do so, but until we’ve secured IP formally on all the stuff it’ll be hard to talk about in the depth that I’m sure TMVers will want to talk about it on.

That said, I am going to bring up one thing I’m working on very briefly because it’s part of a “contest.” I’m going to quote something I sent to a message board I’m on because I need to go camping in 15 minutes:

I’ve been working with some friends I went to school with to create a design that is a new spin on generating electricity from the sun called concentrated solar power. Basically, instead of converting directly from the sun like photovoltaics (solar cells) you collect all the energy and store it as heat, then generate electricity from the heat. There are several advantages and disadvantages, but I think it has a key role to play going forward. The biggest advantage is that you can generate power 24 hours a day, which means you can get by with a lot few batteries. It also will put out “waste heat” that can be used to heat your water or run a solar air conditioner (something that we’re going to work on designing next) so it’ll greatly cut down on energy needs too.

Utility level csp plants are starting to be built, but there isn’t any solution for small scale applications. That’s what we’re trying to do. We came up with some pretty creative ideas that take advantage of our expertise in understanding complex systems dynamics, and we have a design that based on initial talks with suppliers we can probably make as cheaply as grid power costs initially, and eventually make it far cheaper. We also can make a simplified version that will be very very cheap for tropical developing countries. Hopefully we’ll get it made because it’ll be the cornerstone of lots of stuff I want to make that will allow people to grow their own food, use much less energy and produce their own fuel.

We are collaborating with some professors at Case Western Reserve University and have made an SBIR grant proposal (government money to help develop new commercial products that are based on exploratory research) that we’re waiting to hear back on, but we also just found out about this GE contest called Ecomagination. The actual contest part is pretty lame because they don’t give you enough space to communicate the idea, and really it’s just a way for them to get lots of people to pitch their ideas so GE can see whether any ones are worth pursuing a relationship with, however if you like the idea then it’d be great if you clicked here and voted for it because I assume the more votes it has the better chance that the GE judges will look at it closely.

Oh yeah, also we want to do as much manufacturing as possible in domestically to provide as much economic benefit as possible [TMV note: We purposefully designed it to only use basic materials and as simple as manufacturing as possible in order to expand the regions where it can be produced. We are planning on licensing the technology to independent firms in each targeted country, so it’ll be more of a franchising model of production.]

So yeah, click here if you want to vote on it, it’s been demanded of me that I tell everyone I know. I’m not good at self promotion since originally when my coinventors asked me to tell people I said I didn’t know of anyone.

I’m going for the weekend but I’ll be up for explaining more when I get back.