The Crisis

A crisis is developing that could be repeated across the country.   This crisis can have a profound impact on the local economy and is hardest on the poor.  It can also drive many local businesses out of the area, compounding it's impact on the poor.

There are several major cities where peak demand for power exceeds the grid's ability to deliver.   Whenever this occurs it can cause massive price increases,  rolling brownouts, and large scale blackouts.    In addition, current plans to accommodate increasing power demands require major new infrastructure and will depend on fuels that are already expensive and getting worse.

The stage is set for a return of the crisis days when bills for some homes went over $800 per month and major businesses where sending thousands of people home on a regular basis because they did not have power to run their factories and traffic slowed to a stop because the signal lights where out.    This time around it will be harder because all the easy solutions have already been exhausted.

The last time around this issue ended up costing California tax payers billions of dollars in a booming economy but this time around it is likely to hurt more in an already shaky recovery.

A solution will require clear decisive action from the highest officials backed by a comprehensive plan and the will to push past resistance from entrenched players.    Action must be taken soon to to avoid the associated economic turmoil.

The XDOBS solution

XDOBS has developed  an environmentally friendly way of producing electricity most efficiently during the peak energy consumption times and which has a positive impact on the environment.  

It is specifically designed to avoid the use of expensive high tech components or scarce entities like high purity silicon that could drive up costs under under heavy demand.  As a result,  it can be deployed at a volume not feasible for other technologies and this rapid high volume deployment is essential if we are to meet the large scale California demands. 

This solution will resolve the looming power crisis developing in California while increasing Jobs across the nation.   It can be funded from money saved by eliminating the side effect problems of crisis and the costs savings by not having to pay for the current strategies.   It can be scaled and deployed fast enough to avert the problem in California and other metropolitan areas of concern before it becomes a major crisis. 

It will substantially lower demand for both Natural Gas and oil which can allow  market drivers to stabilize or reverse the horrendous increasing prices of natural gas and oil and as a result lower the cost of natural gas generated electricity.

We believe the XDOBS solution can provide the economic foundation for the next  boom that the United States needs to retain our world leadership position in both technology and social development.   It can also push the US towards a local capital investment over the current exported  funds for consumables and we view this capital shift as essential for long term economic prosperity.

It is our hope that this solution will will benefit our own children and future generations for years to come. 

Reduced Brownouts

Brownouts are commonly caused when there is insufficient power to meet current demand.  This can be caused by insufficient generating capacity or insufficient wires to cary the power from where it is generated to where it is consumed.     As a result the power company will lower the voltage of the power in a given area so that they have more power power to go around and if that is not sufficient they will cut power entirely to some areas rather than risk having their expensive interstate lines burn out like fuses.   

These outages can have a profound impact on local electronics destroying unprotected electronics like computers,  sterios and televisions.  

The XDOBS solution takles this problem head on by:

• Lowering the peak demand.
• Reducing power usage by prime culprits that are using a lot of power during normal peak demand.
• Generating local power that can be consumed close to the point of demand.
• Spreading demand across a wider part of the day to lower better average the peak demand.

Most of the time the power grid is running at excess capacity so we if can take 10% to 20% of the load off during these conditions then we eliminate the problem.

The standards strategy to deal with this problem is to either run in new high capacity lines and to build local natural gas fired plants to that fire up under these conditions.   The problem with both of these is that new high capacity lines are very expensive in heavily populated areasand second the peak demand plants sit idle most of the time which represents a large underutilized capital investment and when they do activate they are burning a very expensive fuel and that cost must be passed back to the consumers.   The natural result of is that the is that there will always be tension between building enough new plants to meet demand while at the same time not investing any more capital than absoltely essential which sit's idle most of the time and this idle problem makes it very difficult for indpenent companies to fund the new peak demand plants because they will not get enough hours to pay off their capital costs so their higher fuels costs are compounded by having to charge even more per Kilowatt which makes them cost ineffective. 

Big Savings

Savings of over 100% can be obtained in less than 10 years with 400% available during in 25 years and that is if the cost of natural gas and power does not continue to increase so we think savings substantially higher will be obtained. use.   Our sales department can explain how this ROI is obtained and can provide a spreadsheet which shows how you can save.

• TODO: Demonstration Videos - A Series of Flash Videos that show you how the unit works.

Easy to Deploy

Water Purification

Save Money

•  We can explain how

Rapid Installation

Market Background and Power Crisis

Economic boost and Clean Power the XDOBS way.  

According to the 2005 state of California energy outlook report there are many areas throughout their state and the entire Country, particularly in major cities that are running with insufficient power.   In some instances they are running with less than a 4% reserve and there are others that are running with negative reserves especially during particularly hot summers when the demand for more power becomes necessary.   This means that the era of rolling brownouts, radically increased prices and total infrastructure failures which took place in 1998 are unavoidably going to return according to the Energy commission.  As of 2006 there is less new generating capacity coming on line than is necessary to meet new demands of growth  which means we are going from bad to worse in a time of economic constipation which the State of California and other Major cities cannot afford. 

To put this in perspective most of the time the electric grid has excess capacity both in generation and carry capacity.  However, during times of heavy demand such as air-conditioning on a hot day during July  problems begin to arise.   Unfortunately Air conditioner demands on hot days aggravates other conditions and increases the risk of failure during those peak hours of the over stressed power grids. In addition there are a variety of economic factors that when combined indicate that the cost of electricity will continue to increase rapidly which will have a negative impact on several economies.  For example, since California is drawing power from the other states in the  west coast region  their demand for power not only increases the price of energy  for their State but other States are noticing their own supplies are diminishing and are now becoming more expensive as well.       

We have seen government reports which claim that electricity prices will stabilize through 2015.  However, other studies show quite the opposite to be true.  Economic factors alone substantiate an increasing demand of scarce resources and an increasing cost for installing new capital infrastructure such as expensive transmission lines.   It is already much more expensive to generate electricity using natural gas or oil than other technology such as Coal or Hydro-electric plants, yet the electrical industry as a whole is moving towards generating more power using gas or oil which has increased dramatically in price over the last few months to the point where we will have an obvious and unavoidable result of increased electrical prices.  

A lot of strategies focus on conservation which is fine but tends to break down when the line to comfort is crossed.    People are willing to be a little warmer on a hot day and willing to have a slightly more dim light but after a certain point they turn up their own air conditioner and leave it to their neighbor to conserve.    Switching to florescent bulbs that deliver the same light for 20% of the power and adding insulation are good and should be encouraged but they are inherently limited in the total gross impact.      We believe that any long term strategy must allow the largest mass of people to live comfortably and that it should do so while combating the core economic factors that are causing energy to take a larger portion of the consumers budget.       

Current Economy and Myopic approach

Alternate energy systems have been and will continue to be more expensive per watt than centralized electrical generation and as a result many experts will claim that they are not economically feasible for large scale deployment.    This thinking is OK as far as it goes but as we explain in this paper there are costs buried in the existing strategies that far exceed the cost of the XDOBS thermal generation solution.   

Rather than looking at our favorite technology and trying to shoe horn it into an economic model where the payoff just isn't present XDOBS started by looking at areas where there are very expensive problems looming and then completed extensive research and design to find a combination of technology and manufacturing techniques that can help us resolve or dramatically reduce these problems.    We hope to divert some of the money from these cost areas into the implementation of the XDOBS solution which will not only greatly reduce some very expensive issues but will help establish an economic framework that will be self perpetuating to the long term  good of our children, our nation our economy, our environment and the World as a whole.   

Technology alone is inadequate to address this problem.  It will require a combination of careful economic thinking along with specific government programs to bring about such a solution that is much less expensive than the alternative.  The next section will show without question the obvious yet outrageous costs of the current approach that seem to be avoided in real costs to the public in general.

Truth and the Economy

Power will get more expensive fast

Substantial amounts of electrical production are being moved from traditional generation approaches such as Nuclear, Hydro and Coal to Natural gas.  There are many reasons for this but most of them are environmentally driven such as it being almost impossible to get permits for new hydro electric reservoirs in the USA and taking years and millions of dollars to get new nuclear plants approved.  In addition many large industrial users have switched from fuels like Coal to Natural gas because it was cheaper than building new high efficiency scrubbers.  

These new natural gas users have substantially increased demands for natural gas which has already resulted in substantial price increases and since it is already running in short supply we expect increasing demand to continue driving natural gas prices up.     

In the past Natural gas reserves have been rebuilt during the summer when less was used but now peak GAS demand will coincide with peak electrical demand which will mean that there will no longer be a slack period to rebuild reserves which will drive natural gas prices up even further and may well spawn it's own crisis with prices doubling or tripling in a very short period of time.

Increasing natural gas prices will have a double whammy impact since consumers will be paying more for their natural gas used for heating.  The electrical utilities will be paying more to generate electricity and this cost will be passed back to the consumer.  Since the percentage of electricity generated with natural gas is expected to approach 50% over the next 15 years the power will be even higher since there will be less cheap power from Hydro, Coal and Nuclear available.  As the cost of power goes up it can have a dramatic impact on marginally profitable companies who can no longer afford to pay for air conditioning and as a result end up having massive layoffs or firing a lot of people and increasing unemployment.    

The best thing for consumers, small business and marginal large business is for gas prices to stabilize and go down, but the only way for this to happen is lower the demand for Natural gas by at least 10% and ideally by 20%.  This will put the existing system at over capacity and will allow market factors to drive costs down.  The XDOBS solution when fully implemented has the ability to substantially lower natural gas consumption both for electrical production and for heating.  Since we will be lowering peak demand which is almost exclusively natural gas supplied a larger fraction of the electricity can be purchased from inexpensive sources such as Hydroelectric.

Blackouts and Rolling brownouts have a cost

Rolling brownouts occur whenever the demand for electricity exceeds the grid capacity to deliver that electricity.  This can be caused by insufficient generating capacity or insufficient capacity for the lines to carry the power from where it is generated to where it is consumed.   The electric companies use the rolling brownout to avoid burning up their infrastructure which would cause major blackouts.  

During the peak of the rolling brownout days during 1998, 1999  according to several people we interviewed who worked at Hewlett Packard  in Cupertino, CA  that they had at least a dozen days during that period where HP had to close the entire facility for ½ day or more as a result of the brownouts.    In just one building there where 3,000 employees and there where 5 similar buildings at this facility with a net of  15,000 people who where idled as a result of each rolling brownout.  Since most of these people where salaried the company lost their production without a corresponding decrease in expense.  If you assume that these employees average $70,000 per year in a salary and each outage was 4 hours then the cost per outage per employee was $135 so if you multiply that by 12 outages this equates to $1631 per employee or $24.5 million lost for one site of one company and that does not count the idle capital from the buildings nor the benefits for the employees.  Our calculations showed at least 50 or more similar sized facilities in the same area with similar numbers of employees which adds to a total of  $1.2 billion lost in just one area.  If you speak with many senior managers at similar sized companies you will find that a $24.5 million loss is often the difference between a profitable company and one that has a loss for that division which can be the difference between 15,000 good jobs and 15,000 unemployed workers.  This creates a state of economic destruction.      

In addition to the high tech workers you also had many retail stores that where shut down  during these outages.  In the same area there are at least 150 average sized grocery and retail stores which ended up loosing  12 days times ½ a day or 6 net shopping days.  When one multiplies this times the 150 stores  it comes out to 900 shopping days where there where no sales and as a result a great deal of loss to the company and state due to the lack of sales tax.   According to our conservative estimates the average store would sell  $30,000  in inventory that was not sold on those days.  If we multiply this times the number of stores multiplied by the number of lost days you would arrive at a figure of around 27 million dollars.  When you take the loss of cost to the entire economy and tax base, the XDOBS solution begins to make perfect sense.

Equipment cost

Every time you push the grid close to capacity or introduce blackouts and rolling brownouts you end up with power spikes and surges in the system.  These had an impact on people personally.  Another individual that we interviewed  had a large screen television go out with a $600 power transistor and several other electricity quality related failures.  Over the two year period this individual lost at least $2500 in equipment due to surge damages, If you multiply that cost across the 5 million or so people affected you get over a billion dollars in property damage.  The XDOBS solution will eliminate this issue for less money than the expense of  these combined problems in the first year of implementation.  Some could argue that the loss of so many electrical products helped drive the economy since these people ended up buying replacements, but negligently damaging personal property in order to drive sales seems like a bad decision.

Pollution Costs

According to studies done by the EPA we put 2 billion metric tons of pollutants into the air per year as a result of Coal, Oil, gas, and hydroelectric plants. These are the damaging pollutants that are measured by the EPA and as a result other major equipment such as cars and factories have to be put under more strict emissions standards to keep the total air quality high.  This increases the cost of the capital items substantially which is passed along to the consumer in the form of being able to buy less per dollar.  In addition business that are having to purchase high efficiency environmentally friendly equipment increases their expenses to cause avoiding building or expanding in the area which ultimately leads to loss of new job opportunities.  As air quality decreases in a problem area existing businesses can be required to upgrade major capital equipment which at the very least lowers profitability and could drive marginal businesses under which can result in the loss of existing jobs for that local economy.  The Xdobs solution would reduce the current electrical and heating contribution to pollution which can defer or eliminate the expense of costly air control restrictions.

Melting Polar Caps

Many argue that the 2 billion metric tons of pollution we are putting into the air is the cause of global warming.  Eventually, experts claim, this could result in the melting ice at both the north and South Pole thereby increasing ocean levels  which could cause massive flood damage in low lying areas.   

Thermal Expansion of water

In addition warm water expands slightly which means that even if the polar ice doesn't completely melt the ocean volume will increase as the temperature goes up which can also cause flooding. These two together can combine to make a double whammy effect that will be very expensive.  The best thing man  can do to minimize this risk is to  dramatically lower the output of greenhouse gases and one way to do that is to minimize the amount of electricity and space heating that must be done using natural gas, coal and oil.  The cost of just a small portion of this damage would pay to equip a large number of buildings with the XDOBS system which in turn would reduce greenhouse emissions by thousands of tons per year.  If you were to take into account the major cities such as New Orleans, Houston, the Netherlands and several coastal cities in the US and World we would see trillions of dollars of damage due to rising ocean levels which could devastate the entire world economy.  The financial loss of a single major city would more than offset the deployment cost of the XDOBS solution for a major portion of the United States .

Hurricanes and warm water

Hurricanes like Katrina and Andrew which caused billions in damage are fed by warm ocean water which is the main reason they occur mostly during the late summer and fall when the ocean water is warm enough for them to breed and grow.  There are a lot of factors but very powerful storms require warmer water.    If the ocean temp increases by  2 degrees then the region where these storms can grow and survive expands which means that some  areas previously immune to hurricanes can now be hit at full strength while increasing the ferocity of the storms that hit current areas both of these add up to major damage.    We obviously can not say the XDOBS system will eliminate hurricanes but it will help eliminate tons of greenhouse gases  per year which will do its part for slowing down the greenhouse warming and will slow down the warming of the tropical oceans thereby removing some of the energy that these storms feed on.  In any case if you eliminated one major storm in a century that had Katrina like strength or even dropped a category 5 storm to category 3 before it made land fall it would pay for the entire XDOBS system deployment.

Ice Age

There are others that argue their studies indicate the increasing temperature in the oceans will increase evaporation which will increase cloud cover which will reflect some sunlight away that would hopefully create a self balancing effect, but these experts also agree that as the clouds cool the earth all the extra water vapor would condense out in the form of massive storms and possibly even start a mini ice age which would be incredibly expensive just like coastal flooding.  

While these various studies disagree in certain areas, there is no question that they all seem to agree on the critical issue that we are going to see massive weather changes which will bring extremities on each end of the spectrum and will certainly cause major destructions throughout the world, unless we can decrease the current pollution problem on a global scale.

Help Needed

Building, proving and deploying a solution such as the XDOBS thermal electric generation system requires significant amounts of cooperation and funds.    We are talking with interested parties who have a  belief in the problem and a strong desire to see a real solution and are willing to contribute to that solution.     We  are interested in those who want to own a part of XDOBS as a private company but are generally only interested in qualified investors who also bring substantial business expertise or contacts and are willing to use them on our behalf.

We are most interested in large groups that have have substantial political clout and are are interested in dramatically reducing environmental impact of power generation,  heating and air conditioning.    Similarly we are interested in groups that have strong interest in local manufacturing jobs, construction jobs and a generally healthy economy and are willing to endorse a strategic view of how to achive it.

We are equally interested in those who have high level political contacts that can help us gain visibility with the critical decision influencers especially well placed senators, congressment and governers both at the state and federal level.   

Obviously those people who are world class sales people and willing to invest time and money helping us build our distribution channel will be of interest and legal professionals who have time to contribute and belive pashionatly in our strategic solution can  be of assistance.

In additon those people or businesses interested in early access to and testing of the technology are welcome.    And those who have access to and credibility with people that can influence investement strategy at NREL and DOE are most welcome.

XDOBS solution

XDOBS has developed a low cost thermal electric generation system for commercial building retrofit. Our system produces a substantial amount of waste heat that can be used for both heating and cooling demands creating substantially lower energy requirements for both. 

In energy starved areas such as Los Angles the XDOBS solution would eliminate the grid over burden problems and rolling brownouts.   It is based on the premis of generating power close to the point of demand so that new high capacity lines and large generation plants are not required.

Due to the complexity of the existing power system and the cost of building new infrastructure in high developed areas  the XDOBS solution can be deployed and a net lower cost so much so that while it will have a 25 to 30 year operational life it's entire capital investment can be paid back in 10 years or less.  

This plan will dramatically reduce the number of natural gas plants needed to service peak demand and this will lower demand on natural gas in that region.    In addition the plan can lower the total net power generation requirements enough to substantially reduce Californias current and longer term power supply contract problems and put the state into a much more favorable buying position. 

  Our plan is the only one available that can be produced without high tech materials so it can be scaled up rapidly, fabricated and installed by local workers which will help both unemployment and capital investment.  

We expect that if the first few businesses work well that we can get a DOE + California department of energy sponsored grant to retrofit a large fraction of the over 50,000 square foot  buildings in the area.    Our strategy can eliminate tons of air pollutants produced by electrical facilities without placing a higher demand on silicon which tends to drive up photovoltaic prices.  Our current tests indicate that we should be able to produce over 125KW of power from the rooftop of a single super store.  This would be enough to run their entire air conditioning system and most in store electronics and our power generation design generates at peak at the same time the local grids are under peak demand so when they need it worst our system is producing the most.   We also have the ability to store generating capacity using low tech easy to fabricate strategies that do not require caustic chemicals like batteries that are inexpensive and unlike Photovoltaic systems ours can keep producing into the late afternoon hours when people are returning to their homes and are increasing electrical demands for the housing arena.    .

Residential support

Retrofitting large commercial buildings in our peak demand areas will drive unit volume high enough that we can bring the cost down to where it is cost effective for private home owners to deploy. (Especially if there is the right kind of government guaranteed loans and government incentives made available for capital).     Our simple design means that we can drive costs very low and as a result with large numbers of home owners will have the ability  to install the system.  The natural result will be for most homes in the affected area to generate a net surplus of power during the peak demand conditions and as a result we could extend the life span of the existing infrastructure by decades without major upgrades.    Home owners end up with a double benefit since the system dramatically decreases solar exposure to the roof top and will extend the life of their roof by many years as such it almost pays for it self even before you include the power savings.  

Complementary technologies yield a net surplus of power

Our technology has the ability to produce substantial amounts of waste heat.  This heat can be used directly during the winter for space heating and when combined with a geothermal heat pump can mostly eliminate natural gas usage for those buildings that are equipped.   In addition there are two well understood and readily available technologies that can use this waste heat for air conditioning which can almost eliminate the most power hungry piece of the air conditioners which is the compressor.   Buildings so equipped will under many conditions generate a surplus of local power that can help meet the demands of the local grid.

 Keep Local Money Local for Local Jobs and Local Capital

All economies eventually have to balance so the amount of money leaving the state to pay for fuel will eventually have a net negative impact on the economy since there is not always a corresponding increase in revenue and since this money is for a consumable item such as Natural gas it is simply gone once used.  In contrast spending an equivalent amount of money on capital improvements is a better option since you still have the capital improved item as an asset that can be sold to recover the money originally spent which you can not do with pure expense like natural gas.   Any economy rides on the common person spending money.  A plan which lowers unemployment and creates tens of thousands of new jobs is a much better decision than simply exporting the money to pay for a consumable resource like Oil or Natural Gas.The XDOBS Renewable Energy Electric, Heat and Cooling Solution:

The Theory of Distributed Power to Reduce Costs

Distributed power is the concept of moving some of the electrical generation out of the major facilities to smaller installations where Electricity is generated in smaller chunks closer to the point of consumption.   Taken to an extreme every building would generate all of its own power.     

The XDOBS solution is a form of distributed power generation and is in the DOE roadmap so there should be grant dollars available to help commercialize this product.    The XDOBS solution is unique in that it uses well understood concepts that require only readily available materials and can be scaled up and deployed rapidly and at a cost effective level.   

DOE favors large centralized facilities

The DOE (Department of Energy) and Sandia labs is researching distributed energy using large concentrator dishes that can produce a megawatt each.    They like this strategy because it produces efficient power at 29.4% conversion but we don't believe the large dish strategy is the right direction due to high construction costs and it is very expensive to make rugged enough for large scale distribution where they will withstand 100 mile per hour wind and their very basis makes them very heavy where that weight must be centered around the disk mount which limits your points of distribution.   In general distributed generation is more expensive per kilowatt than large scale centralized plants but it is accompanied by a corresponding decrease in infrastructure such as carrying lines.   In wide open areas like Montana and Wyoming it can be expensive to run new lines but in heavily populated areas such as San Jose California it can be 100 times more expensive and it is those areas that have the highest demand and which need more power desperately.

The Key Oportunity

It appears the primary market for distributed power will be those areas that get into trouble under peak demand conditions such as San Jose summer air conditioning. 

The problem Areas

Several of California 's larger cities are running at less than 5% reserve and some are running at negative reserves for extra hot summers which mean mandatory blackouts and rolling brownouts whenever the grid infrastructure is running at close to 100% capacity especially during hot conditions so the risk of catastrophic failure is substantially increased.   These areas tend to be heavily built up and also have existing electrical grids that will be very expensive to upgrade to carry more capacity into the area.  If you can deliver a technology that could reduce demand in those troubled areas by 10% to 15% during peak demand conditions then you could fund the deployment of the XDOBS solution by the amount of deferred capital that does not have to be invested in grid upgrades and local gas fired peak demand plants.      

Needed to resolve issue

To meet the peak market opportunity you need a technology that can be unobtrusively installed in built up areas so that it can generate the power close to the point of consumption during those peak conditions.  It can not generate a lot of noise and does not place additional stress on other existing infrastructure such as Natural gas pipelines.    It would be nice if during emergency conditions these could deliver some power to the local grid even when the local water, gas infrastructure has been interrupted.  Such as conditions like hurricanes or other natural disasters.  Wherein these subsystems can act as a source for limited emergency power for hospitals or other necessary emergency management  infrastructure which would not other wise be available and could substantially increase their duration of operation in such conditions with out requiring an increase of stored fuel.  In addition you need to do this in a neighbor friendly way without creating substantial noise.  Watt for watt this power may be more expensive than centralized power but since it defers major capital required to upgrade other major infrastructure items its capital cost can be paid for with those savings.  In addition the savings from eliminating mandatory rolling blackouts can be substantial since they will no longer have to close the businesses in the area where we have been able to take the load off the system.  The solution should be able to leverage an underutilized resource such as commercial roof tops and if feasible should provide an ability to lower total power needed for heating and cooling activities.  It should be simple enough to install that 90% of the work can be done by normal construction workers with only the high voltage connections being done by licensed electricians.  This will create a large boost to the economy while at the same time accomplish the goal to protect the environment.

Why is XDOBS working on this

A desire to help

When Joe our founder, started in computers and software he wanted an oportunity to have a truely beneficial impact on the world but throughout the next 20 years he like most people has worked predominantly on commerical projects that helped a few people get richer or saved a few rich people money but it never had a truely beneficial impact on large numbers of people.   During this time he has never forgotten this goal but he has picked up a set of technical, business and market skills that have made this project feasible.    We hope that this solution will have a profoundly positive impact on both people and the economy.

A need to tackle core issues

We view the current trend towards rapidly spiraling fueld costs as detrimental to the long term economy and that in the short term it would have a profoundly negative impact on the poor and those who are just barely making it from month to month.   We felt that a solution which targets the underlying causes of the problem was essential and we happened to have available the skill set to not only develop the solution but to also find clever economic and marketing strategies to get it deployed at sufficient levels to change the underlying economic equation.      

A capital centric solution will promote long term prosperity

We feel that as long as such a large fraction of the economy is hostage to consumable fuels especially those that must be imported that we are simply at too high a risk of external factors causing economic turmoil while at the same time we are exporting too much of our wealth to other countries rather than using it to build our local economy and capital base.

We understand the aurguments about cash flow and open markets but certain fundemental rules still apply such as such as money spent on a capital investment can generally be sold in the future so you spend money but still have the some or all of the value that can be re-invested in the future.     We believe that a strategy that favors a capital investment in tangible goods will generally yield better long term financial positions just like most people who invest in a house financially benefit over the long term.     In additon money spent in the local economy is more likely to cycle back in the form of revenue than money spent in countries that are far way.  

There is a finite amount of petroleum based resources and the faster we can shift to using the petroleum assets to produce long term durable tangible  capital products and away from burning it as fuel the longer this asset will last for our grandchildren so it is reasonable to encourage such a spending pattern where feasible.

We are in a unique position where we can fund the XDOBS renewable solution at a cost that can be easily paid for in less than 10 years especially in those areas that are heavily built up and facing inadequate power reserves now or in the next 10 years.    This is critical because previous renewable energy products could hardly be justified based on up front costs versus fuel based strategies.     The new higher fuel prices combined with a high probability of further increases combined with our  ability to cost effectively mass produce the solution puts us at a juxtoposition where the scales have tipped and it gives us an oportunity to shift to the renewable, capital centric solution at the same or lower 10 to 15 year cost.     We believe that when looking at the probably 5 year price increases in petroleum that we we will actually find the XDOBS installation paying off in 7 years or less and in some situations where we can help avert the power crisis in a major city some of which are as few as 2 years away  then the XDOBS system will be paid for from an economic perspective in the first few months of the crisis that was avoided.

Cross functional skills are mandatory

Developing and deploying a solution like this requires skills in many areas from mechanical design, electrical design, electronics design, thermal design, architectural design, economics, large scale solution design and understanding solutions in the context of the economy and finance and most important and good grasp of how to move a product from concept through market adoption.

The people at XDOBS people have over 25 years of experience in building, marketing and delivering software solutions and in many instances these software solutions required us to build small embedded pieces of hardware to augment the software.

Our applications have covered the gamet from small scale tracking devices to large scale customer portals and CRM projects and in every project we had to learn enough about that domain to effectively apply the technology to the local problem.   

This exposure has given us a broad cross industry knowledge that was essential for us to be able to understand the problem but even more important understand the market drivers and develop a solution that takes advantage of the market conditions.

Large Complex system optimization required

Our most important skills is extensive training in understanding and finding ways to optimize very large and very complex systems from many different domains.  This is essential because it allows us to cross many different areas of expertise and synthesize a solution that is not obvious to the people focused in only one specialty.     Our patent pending technology uniquely positions us so that when it is combined with market analysis and the ability to find niche customers that will pay to solve their specific problems then we are ideally positioned to deploy this solution on a large scale.  

Understanding how to use the economy and market

One of the the things we had to learn was large scale analysis to determine the market feasibility of a given idea and how this product could be made sucessful if taken to market. This included price point analysis, feature analysis, etc.  We used this analysis to find a few niches where our renewable energy system could be deployed effectively and then used our other skills and extensive research to design and develop a solution that would meet the needs of that niche better than other technology.

Core skills are good match for the hard parts

Interestingly enough a large fraction of the overall solution requires areas that we are experts in such as software and embedded systems to track the sun,   Telemetry aggregation for automatic dispatch when service is needed,   3D cad design and drawings,    Inverters and line synchronization,  etc.      Since we had so many of the required pieces of expertise which tend to be very expensive when contracted out it positioned us well to design and build the entire solution.   Well we don't actually build the entire solution since most components are manufactured by experts in that area but that is a standard part of mass manufacturing.

Resources

• Parabolic caculator - Spreadsheet for calculating the shape of a parabolic reflector which and includes ability to change focus point.   excel version

Reference Links

See the San Jose power line project 300 million for 24 miles for 400 kilovolts which we could have replaced for roughly the same amount but with better long term health, environmental and economic impacts.

Core Technology 

• What is a Parabola
• Tesla builders Association
• What is a Tesla Turbine
• What is a Stirling Engine
• What is Rankine Cycle
• What is Carnot Heat Engine
• What is Brayton Cycle
• What is Ericsson Cycle
• Solar Power Defined and Explained
• Link to Stirling Engine Information
• NREL large scale solar thermal

3D CAD

• Alibre Design - So far my favorite.  They have a free version but by the time you buy the IGES export and add free you will have spent about $500 they also have a top of the line version made for machinest that is $1,495.  Very complete and very comprehensive product with good 3D support.
• EMachineShop - Free Cad software with a definite purpose.   I was able to work through their two video demonstrations and start performing real work in less than 1/2 day.  They have a good starting model where you start with a block of material and start carving it away to get the desired shape.   It has no concept of assemblies so you have to envision the entire machine and then draw each component.   They can then price the part in real time and give you an estimate and a delivery time frame.   Their costs for single parts seems to be extremely competitive and their cost for tooling on pressure die is quite good.   For a quick part I still find my self coming back to this tool because the real time draw, estimate, change cycle is extremely helpful.
• Autocad Inventor - Have not got a chance to use it but it is the standard.   tool that most people think about.   
• DesignCAD 3D - Very good 3D drawing but seems to lack an understanding of physical manufacturing.  You can easily draw most things in 3D but moving from there to a buildable part takes a lot of understanding.  I purchased my version from Amazon for $69
• AC3D -  Cute, very good on perspectives,  lacks good support for thought process of machining real products.   Only $59.

Animation

One thing that makes modern design much easier than it was in the days of Stirling and Tesla is the ability to actually conceive of and see new mechanisms in action prior to building them.  Even more important is the ability to explain the operation to other people quickly and easily.   3D simulation is an incredibly valuable aid in this process.
 
In the process of evaluating 3D cad packages we discovered  a package called CADSM http://www.cadsm.com/ which is only $29 and has a 30 day free eval.   This software allows you to draw the engine and build up the motion as a set of physical parameters that it runs through a simulator.   
 
The learning curve is a little bit steep and their on line video tutorials need some work to make things clear but all in all it is still reasonably easy to get up and going with reasonable complexity requiring less than 3 days learning.    It requires some understanding of the underlying math to get fancy relationships but the rest is reasonably easy.       I suspect that once learned it that a trained person can generate the animations in 1/5th the time of manually drawing each slide and taking snapshots and the resulting animation will be more accurate.
 
I use some software from Unflash.com called screenflash which can record a region of the screen and convert it automatically into a gif sequence or flash movie.  This means you can run the simulation and record it for presentation without having to manually assemble the images.
 
 
 

Why Not TEC - Peltier modules: 

• Our original intention was to use TEC (Thermocouple)  modules that would have allowed us to produce power directly from heat but after extensive research and testing we came to the conclusion that TEC modules just did not produce at a high enough level of efficiency to produce a viable price point.   This ended up as a net benefit because in the end we where able to substantially simply the design and eliminate one possible point of short supply that could have driven prices up by moving to a thermal mechanical design.    
  
  This is an example of being well served by our software background because we took the proposed design and built prototypes necessary to prove the hardest or riskiest parts and as a result of this early testing we found  the TEC issue early in the process and where able to modify our plans without catastrophic impact.

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