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Christophe Santerre:

On The OPEN SOURCE ENERGY project: open and collaborative energy

“As usual, he checks the control module. The load is good and the lights are green. He will spend a good night because he knows that tomorrow morning there will be enough power to heat the coffee and the toasts and moreover for the big party in the evening. It is true that the well established wind from the West and the amount of water that fell last night greatly helped to increase the reserve of energy.”

We are not in a science fiction novel but looking at what could become the daily routine in the near future. Our character could have been seduced by a turnkey solution amortized over decades without warranty of one day being paid and coming with an exclusive maintenance contract. It is through a more daring current (no pun intended) he has chosen to do something for future generations while saving money: open and collaborative power generation

Open and collaborative energy/power what is it? The idea is simple. Today most of the available solutions on the market for renewable energies are based on the model of High Tech locked products like the ones from Apple. Solar, wind, and to a lesser extent hydraulics are only accessible through complex and totally opaque systems on which the user is not able to intervene. The open and collaborative energy is not intended to replace the numerous solutions that generate renewable energy but to fill a void. It appears as a Low Tech alternative where the user becomes an actor. Since the advent of electricity in homes, the trend has been in the same direction, toward a centralization of the production. It has allowed the companies to shift from hamlets generators to regional facilities while increasing the power of each station. The user of this energy has been deprived of the means of control and action. What else can we do when facing a switch giving access to an energy we need anyway?

Nourished by the ideas developed by Jeremy Rifkin (Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution. 2012.), the concept of open and collaborative energy tends to relocate production resources in a geo-economic context close to user. Ultimately, the goal is to move toward self-production connected to a community that allows the evolution of technology while providing assistance to the users. (Daniel Cérézuelle, Guy Roustang, L’autoproduction accompagnée, Un levier de changement, Éditions érés, 2010.) Individual needs and the layout of the buildings vary and offer a multitude of possible answers for the development of renewable energies. As we enter the era of complementarities (sources, uses, functions ...) a centralized response will not be as effective as an adapted one. What could be more adapted and affordable than a case by case solution installed and maintained by the user himself/herself?

In open and collaborative energy, the model of the vacuum cleaner salesman has no place. The user is at the heart of the system. He deserves what Victor Papanek (Victor Papanek. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, New York, Pantheon Books, 1971.) calls the "Manifesto of consumer rights", a set of rules that any product and therefore designer should respect:

1 - The right to safety, to be protected against dangerous or poorly designed products 2 - The right to information, not to be manipulated by false information or lack of information. 3 - The right to basic services, fair prices and choices (if monopolies exist, a minimum guaranteed quality at reasonable prices) 4 - The right to representation (to be consulted and to participate in decisions affecting consumers) 5 - The right to be heard through recognized channels and have the right to a prompt and fair compensation 6 - The right to consumer education from the perspective of the users themselves 7 - The right to a safe and healthy environment in which the object has no negative impact.

The development of a project must go through a collaborative work for the transfer of open source technologies, knowledge and skills needed to empower the user. Technologies are not implemented in a fixed system but remain open so that everyone can make a contribution to improve the whole following the principles of the OPEN SOURCE approach already well established in computing as evidenced by the development of LINUX.

Why "open source»? The open approach may seem paradoxical in our Western societies based on the capitalist model, where everything tends to be locked, but it makes sense. Collaborative work stands as an alternative to this model by extracting its wealth, not from the number of items sold, but from the way the relationship between the user, the manufacturer and the object is constructed. Facing disparities of wealth, the open source approach helps these disparities to be leveled by increasing the access to technologies through the contribution of all. In order to meet the needs, everyone can work for the improvement of the whole. Thanks to free flow of ideas, it is not a single team that focuses on an isolated problem but a true collective intelligence similar to crowd-sourcing, which generates the common good. Open source provides the development of the necessary power in a context where the response has to be complex and modular.

The open and collaborative energy is also a great way to raise public awareness on the issues of the necessary changes by making visible the efforts of those who are invested while proving that we can do something without a huge amount of money. The more self-sufficient energy production equipment will be visible the more it will be possible to demonstrate how useful they can be.

The "OPEN SOURCE ENERGY" project

The idea behind the project OPEN SOURCE ENERGY (OSE) is the reappropriation of the energy production at the individual level through the transformation of the everyday environment in a multitude of potential and complementary sources of energy. The OSE approach is based on establishing a set of additional and interchangeable modules for a perfect adaptation of technologies to the ground realities and to the needs of the users. Transparency in the construction allows them to repair and to easily adapt the devices, helped by available data on the technology.

Born in the heart of ENSCI-Les Ateliers (French Design School in Paris), the project has been able to make his way in the alternative groups and to gather knowledge and experience from many people. A first production module has been created from parts readily available in a simple and functional design: The EnerCan. This generator module, the first of his lineage, is dedicated to the transformation of mechanical energy resulting from human (muscle) or environmental (wind, hydro ...) activities into viable and adaptable electrical energy. Present on open-source and DIY communities’ event, the team works to spread its ideas in order to gather a growing number of people motivated by the energy transition.

A process of technological and sociological scouting has also been implemented to identify the paths to explore. Links with the past are very important in the project. Thanks to the scouting process, the design is fed by forgotten or obsolete ideas and solutions. The needs of our society are changing at high speed and sometimes overlapping those of previous generations. Collecting and analyzing the results of the work of our ancestors can bring up to date new technologies adapted to current issues but can also lead to the emergence of innovative tools, fruits of mixes between solutions of the past and today's techniques. The tools developed in the OSE project are designed to be easily replicable in order to help their spreading. Ready to be made with simple tools, they were also designed to take a real benefit of digital means of production such as 3D printers (RepRap), digital cutting tools or free programmable modules (Arduino).

The goal is now to create and to maintain links between academic partners such as engineering schools and associative structures such as hackerspaces and fablabs to allow the diffusion of the first module EnerCan and the birth of many innovative projects oriented toward the design of production modules (hydraulic, Stirling engine ...)."

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To go further (in French):

Christopher Santerre - post-industrial designer - ENSCI-Les Ateliers

Geoffroy Levy - innovation catalyst and techno scout - "When the past shows us the way to the future..."

Open Source Energy Project

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