Market maker company

Just putting this not completely thought-out idea out there:

A company which is going to buy awes and sell energy.
First and foremost these would be the larger containerized systems. Building their client base with (bio-) diesel generator service until awes are available.

Advantages:

  • AWES developers have someone to sell to immediately, who is willing to be an early adopter and/or parter for test deployments.
  • Investors have another avenue which some might favor instead of funding tech development directly.

Originally I was thinking about doing this with a ship propulsion awes that can be installed effortless on any ship. (Which obviously doesn’t exist yet) Since it is not the ship owner, but the chartering entity which pays the fuel, the ship owner has less interest to get a system permanently installed.

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Problem: AWE doesn’t happen and the company ends up peddling diesel generators forever instead

It will still have increased the likeliness of awes happening.

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Its just if you want to work on renewable energy, it would suck to get stuck in a company working on diesel products.

I’d still argue that the $ is better spent on product development until the time came that you were ready to ship actual power plants. I would believe AWE would sell ifself if the practical and economical factors were beneficial for the customer. And you might expect subsidies the first years also. There are many people stuck with a diesel generator that would love to go renewable, just for the sake of their PR outside image.

Diesel generators came to mind, since the large ones are containerized as well and one would need to gain experience in freight forwarding, other logistics and operations. Those can be fuelled with biodiesel.
Solar would be an option, too.

To ground the fantasy into reality, you can look at one specific location and think about how the plan would work there. Who would you partner with? What is the price of electricity there currently? And so on.

I don’t know what a suitable location would be. The Faroe Islands are still too big?

Shetland Islands:
http://gsbattery.com/PDFs/EnergyStorageCaseStudy-ShetlandIslandsScotland.pdf

Customers would be the typical awes use cases as listed by many companies.
Here’s twingtech’s take.
i think more experience can be gained by doing medium-term contracts instead of permanent installations.

This looks like the perfect start to learn more:

https://energyandmines.com/
Connecting renewables with mining

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What are the electricity requirements for mines? I imagine too high for an early AWES to deliver.

That’s one reason to make the company. The company could have a standing contract with the mine and switch to awes bit by bit as fast as they become available.
Much easier than an awes developer trying to make a contract with a mine directly.
I believe that production can be rather fast as soon as someone starts cranking out awes.

I think targeting smaller operations has a greater chance of success, because of the greater number of potential customers, and a greater potential of your solution completely answering the electricity needs of the customer, and the potential smaller absolute price difference between your new product and solar for smaller operations. But let’s continue with the mining example.

Let’s assume you won’t be able to compete with existing electricity providers if you don’t already have a cheaper and superior technology. What then? I think cooperation with existing electricity providers instead of with >mining< companies directly would make sense. Question then becomes, what are existing electricity providers and what can you offer them?

Let’s assume you or an investor is willing to subsidize the difference in cost between an AWES and solar, as an investment in R&D and marketing.

I’m thinking https://twitter.com/energyandmines would be more than happy to weigh in.

Not AWE specific, but such companies exist already

http://www.futurefrogs.com

Looks like a consultancy. They seem like the people who would know about how to go about the market intro, but not like a company that would handle the whole operation.
There are companies out there who do very similar things to what I described. It’s highly unlikely noone is renting out solar containers. So the best way might be to get one of those to heavily buy into awes. For example by doing guaranteed purchases.

Angel investor funding.

When hearing electricity providers, I’m thinking of grid providers. One should rather be looking about specialized companies for offgrid and microgrid installations and rentals. (Except maybe for funding)

Earlier access to a cheaper way of energy generation.
But they could probably do that themselves if they think of it early enough. One could offer them a network. Not me. Maybe Udo Zillmann. Or maybe one makes contracts with developers to get dips on systems (guearanteed purchases) with little funding and can offer those.

Btw.: The motivation is to make market entrance easier for awes. Not to make a profit out of it. But it’s hard to do anything in this world without making a profit or other funding.

The above was already assuming that or similar. An angel investor is no different than any other investor except that they go for start-ups closer to the start of their journey, so take a higher risk, and provide smaller funds. Maybe you want this to be an NGO instead?

That’s what I meant.

You need profit to grow and survive. Your first priority should absolutely be to make a profit. The only difference is you’re doing it with a superior product to a diesel generator.

kPower has for years proposed that kite-hybrid generators are the sweet-spot for mass AWE energy market adoption. At small scale, a village diesel-kite hybrid generator might conserve fuel when AWE input is available to the generator. At utility scale, a gas or coal plant could in principle be converted to AWE hybrid operation. Mixing and switching fossil and kite energy sources is done by over-running clutches on the generator shaft. Several hundred messages on the Old Forum cover details. The kite-hybrid approach is claimed in “Open-AWE_IP-Cloud” (AWE CC IP).

Dr. Thomas Hillig Energy Consulting - THEnergy

THEnergy is a consultancy firm highly-specialized on microgrids/mini-grids and offgrid renewable energy. We focus on commercial and finance solutions and also cover technical aspects in larger projects. We started in large-scale solar-diesel hybrid projects for the mining industry. Over time, we also have added smaller applications such as off-grid renewables for hotels/resorts and rural electrification.

https://www.th-energy.net/

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