Connecting solar power and open source software

Jason Brooks, writing in his eWeek Linux and Open Source Blog, offers an interesting comparison between the impact emerging solar power technologies will have on traditional electric power generation companies, and the impact of Open Source software on Microsoft and similar players:

While the technologies required to harness the Sun's abundance remain, for now, on the horizon, the means to tap the equally unbounded intellectual potential of people around the world has already been invented—particularly where software is concerned. Just as new energy technologies will cut back on—and, in time, will likely erase—the need for massive, centralized power production infrastructures, the Internet is already dissolving the requirement that software be developed at and distributed from sprawling corporate campuses.

Not surprisingly, the companies who've counted on collecting cash from every person who consumes software—chief among these being Microsoft—are regarding these changes with no small measure of discomfort. Microsoft, having amassed the means to tap the unlimited store of human knowledge in a way that hadn't been possible for just anyone to do, is watching new technologies threaten to open up those unlimited stores of power and profit to anyone.

Yet another example of Smallification.

Smallificated Wind Power

Interested in wind-generated electric power, but concerned, for various reasons, about giant, whirling propellers? This article from CNET News.com discusses several companies that are taking a different, distributed approach:

Placing a 300-foot high turbine in downtown San Francisco is problematic. But distributed, or on-site, electricity generation systems can help customers get around the transmission bottlenecks and reliability problems of the wholesale electricity grid, Day said.

The idea is to place a network of much smaller wind turbines on rooftops in urban areas.

But why not extend that idea to individual homes? And what about adding photo-electric solar panels to the home mini-grid. Then instead of relying solely on large-scale power plants, we could generate cleaner, greener power through a distributed network of power-generating widgets.