Next-Generation Manufacturing & Prefabrication

The technological advancements that have defined our modern era have rapidly followed an ascendant course.

Until the locomotives of the 1860's, the fastest a human being could travel was on horseback - a limitation that had existed since the dawn of time. Yet once broken, it would only take fifty years for humanity to invent the automobile, radio and airplane - and only fifty years thereafter to discover atomic science, computing and rocketry. In another way of saying: humanity needed 300,000 years to develop a means to outrun a horse, but only a century beyond that to walk on the moon.

We accomplished these goals by continually improving our ability to build systems that could manufacture new technology with ever-increasing precision and sophistication.

The results of these efforts are seen today in the form of our modern marvels: computers, smartphones, air travel and global internet communications. But less seen are the breakthroughs in machining precision, material science, computerized automation and logistical expertise that enabled us to mass-manufacture those marvels in the first place. The capabilities we have developed in those areas would have been unthinkable for all but the last few decades of human history. Without them, the modern era as we know it would not exist.

Nearly every product in our society, even highly complex systems, are mass-produced on automated assembly lines using standardized components. This provides a series of important benefits. Some are clearly practical: when a part of one system breaks down, it can be easily replaced. As systems are identical product models, they can rapidly undergo automated testing and QA. Upgrades become semantically iterative. Cost efficiency for both producers and consumers are maximized.

Yet within increased economies of scale, the greatest benefits are the efficiencies of manufacturing throughput. This is why Boeing, for example, can assemble a 787 Dreamliner in 27 business days. Ford can assemble an F150 pickup truck in 20 hours. Apple can manufacture 350 iPhones every 60 seconds.

Yet while these advances have radically transformed our way of life, they have been largely absent in power plant design.

Even though they may leverage many of the marvels of our modern world, power and resource systems are rarely mass-manufactured as identical product models. Instead, they are generally made to order as unique entities – custom designed and built from scratch.

For most every power plant thus-far built, a utility hired an architect and arrays of engineers to design the plant, followed by contractors to build it, banks and bondholders to fund it, insurance companies to underwrite it, lawyers to approve it and regulators to sign off on it. And if they wanted to build another power plant, they had to wipe the slate clean and repeat the process all over again because the math and materials that worked for plant A didn’t work for plant B - or any other thereafter.

This drastically increases the time and cost of building power infrastructure, which today costs billions of dollars and can take years (if not decades) to complete.

Nuclear power and commercial aviation, for example, share similar degrees of engineering complexity and safety requirements. They must both perform technically sophisticated roles. They must do so under demanding physical conditions. Above all else, they must never fail.

Yet while Boeing or Airbus can assemble a state-of-the-art aircraft in less time than it takes Budweiser to brew a bottle of beer, the following three images show an eight-year time lapse of the latest upgrade to the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, which first went online in 1986. The plant's latest upgrade of two new reactors took ten years to complete at a cost of $25 billion.

The comparatively antiquated processes to manufacture power infrastructure also places significant pressure to extend service lifetime of existing power plants - even as new and superior technologies emerge. As of this writing, more than half American base load power plants were built before 1980 with an expected lifespan of 50 years. Our power infrastructure further uses arrays of non-standardized fuels, and plugs into a power grid that is equally non-standardized and reaching the end of its expected service lifetime.

Accordingly, the United States’ national electric grid is comprised of 7,600 non-standardized power plants, owned by 3,200+ competing utility companies, that transmit electricity through 450,000+ miles of high voltage power lines and millions of miles of lower voltage lines - most of which are both proprietary and vulnerable to natural disasters or blackouts from faltering equipment.

We believe there is a better way.

Scarcity Zero seeks to leverage our latest breakthroughs in manufacturing technology to build power and resource infrastructure as identical, mass-produced systems under a modular standard.

This is how commercial aviation became possible. This is how cars are affordable to most every American. This is how smartphones found their way into most every pocket.

Several companies have begun adopting this mindset into their own manufacturing processes, which has led to emergent prototypes in power system design.

But this by itself is short of a universal standard where our society builds power and resource infrastructure like we build microwaves, plug them in like we install batteries, or swap them as we replace lightbulbs.

Our manufacturing technology is today capable of delivering that standard, which in such capacities accomplishes several important goals:

First, this fractionalizes both time and cost of system assembly. If one imagines the time and expense involved with building a smartphone or SUV, it would be several orders of magnitude greater to design and build each one from scratch as unique, custom entities. The same is true with power and resource systems. By mass manufacturing identical system models to a modular standard, power and resource systems can be built in days instead of years.

Second, this makes it far easier to scale or replace power/resource infrastructure on-demand. If a region needs to double, triple or quadruple its power and resource output, this need can be met simply by bringing in more modular systems and plugging them in. If a system is nearing end of life and needs replacement, this can be facilitated expeditiously – enabling the older system to be repaired, upgraded and/or recycled.

Third and most importantly, this approach allows cogenerative design to be included in all aspects of system engineering. Cogeneration is a process that involves harnessing the excess waste energy of one system to power the functions of others. Interweaving cogeneration throughout multiple aspects of system operation from the design stage enables auxiliary resource production to occur at scale with low to zero additional energy overhead.

In practical terms, cogenerative design gives us ample energy sources to desalinate seawater into both fresh water and hydrogen fuel, as well as power systems for carbon capture, waste management, indoor farming and advanced material synthesis.