Perusing the copy of Technology Review that just came in the mail, there is a one pager about the CEO of a battery company. I really liked her approach and it started me thinking again about my interests in ecological economic development. Look around today and you see a complete infrustructure for servicing the needs of all sorts of vehicles that use internal combustion engines. Engineers know it is a simple matter of power density that has kept batteries from matching fossil fuels for cars and even airplanes. The promise of solid state battery technology to deliver batteries light enough to work and cheap enough to be economic is upon us.
My experience is in information systems, but my real interest is in proving the value of social networks and peer production in the creation of wealth. We are too good at creating exclusionary wealth and need to find a way to manage true scarcities with markets, while opening up the available abundance in shared wealth. I'm going to guess from the outside that the value Sakti3 has is in the form of proprietary software that expresses the condensed experience of decades of recent history in the battery industy. They present the opportunity for very simple and successful business plans
- Get some capital and labor together.
- Use Sakti3 expertise and software to develop a manufacturing capacity for solid state battery products.
- Profit.
The traditional way to do step 1 is to find some investors with spare money to invest, but that is only one alternative. With much smaller amounts of capital and a pool of eager and able labor, the same thing can be done with decentralized capital. Already there are electric and hybrid cars being sold that need to be serviced. The average garage mechanic will be able to replace the components he recognizes when they break, but the batteries are a new technology. In ten or twenty years we can anticipate growing demand not only for new electric cars, but also in replacement batteries and conversions. This predicts a growing market for batteries and growing connected markets to sell and service the products that contain them. These markets will be growing while other markets contract.
It seems that this technology is at a prototype phase, but by addressing the development tasks needed to go from prototype to economic manufacture, many of the risks that make lead times unpredictable are addressed. Only experience will tell if this is so. I know I could find a team as interested as I am in trying this out. Let's say we build a prototype plant that is designed to produce prototype quantities of the new batteries, and at the same time serve as a learning and training environment for building new plants. We would augment the knowledge based systems from Sakti3 with collaboratively build knowledge bases. We will build the financial systems for collaborative enterprise to keep track of all the shared wealth we are building and sharing.
Once we are producing prototype batteries, we can start to supply products and services that use these batteries. One group might build a battery upgrade and plug-in system for one or more Hybrid models, another could do conversions. Smaller markets for smaller batteries would also work well for our decentrallized approach. For instance, there could also be a market for lightweights like pedal/electric cars and cycles. Performance cycles (replacements for traditional motorcycles) and marine power would start in the middle-size for batteries.
As the market and demand develop, our collaboratively build network of labor and capital might even out-compete the traditional methods of capital formation. Either way, we can anticipate a healthy ecosystem if the path to efficient manufature of light/cheap energy cells is realized.