Seeker Blog

“Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies.”

Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, has invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

He’s been joined by Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Grameen Phone, the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh. Last year, Quadir took prototypes of Kamen’s power machines to two villages in his home country for a six-month field trial. That trial, which ended last September, sold Quadir on the technology.

Still, even if some of the technical challenges have been solved (”I know the technology works and I’d fall on my sword to prove it,” insists Kamen), the economic challenges still loom.

Kamen’s goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That’s a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.

Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business — he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

“Isn’t that better for democracy?” Quadir asks. “We see a shortage of democracy in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of people, you will foster real democracy.”

Water and sanitation ranked #6 in the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus - primarily because the usual large-scale infrastructure is so expensive. That equation would change dramatically if the Kamen technology can be mass-manufactured at anything like the $2,000/unit level, then operated by local entrepreneurs. I.e., there is essentially no infrastructure [big engineering], nor administration overhead.

For more technical details see MIT Technology Review:

But the generator project can’t go anywhere until Kamen and Quadir find a manufacturer to produce the device. “It’s very hard to get big companies to start putting serious money toward tooling a product when they are not sure that the ultimate purchaser has the resources and wherewithal to pay for the product,” Kamen says.

The cell phone program, says Quadir, was successful in part because cheap handsets were already being produced in large quantities. Kamen hopes that the encouraging results of trial in Bangladesh may help convince companies to invest.

Large-scale programs designed to bring water to millions at a time depend on building extensive infrastructure. The advantage of Kamen’s generator and water purifier, he argues, is their flexibility. They can be carried into remote villages by just two people. And the generator can run on any local fuel available.

The design concept behind the water purifier, like the Stirling engine, is nothing new: it works by heating and distilling water. What does make it unique is its efficiency — the generator reclaims about 98% of the heat normally lost in the distillation process and reuses it to distill more water, Kamen says.

Running continuously on a few hundred watts of power, a single purifier should provide enough water for a village of 100 people, Kamen estimates. And it can purify water from any source, regardless of what contaminants it might contain. That rules out the need for quality testing or specialized treatment.

The water purifier is called the “Slingshot” because It shoots the residual sludge back out a plastic tube [i.e., sewage sludge in the worst case application - Kamen says it will produce clean water from sewage].

It appears that Kamen has had a cold reception in Washington, reflecting the stranglehold the foreign aid industry has on policy:

Before Kamen met Quadir, he took his inventions to places like the United Nations and the World Bank, part of whose stated goals are to improve access to power and water in the world’s poorest nations. He says he met nothing but skepticism among the experts who told him there were much cheaper and better ways to make power and clean water. He describes these encounters as “the most chilling meetings I ever had in Washington.”

During one such encounter, Kamen lost his cool and blurted out: “Okay, you’ve had 60 years and spent $1 trillion on these two issues. Can you point to the places where you are proud of the success you’ve had?” The meeting didn’t get much farther than that.

Says Kamen, “If you are going to wait for governments or NGOs [non-governmental organizations] to change the world, it is going to take another 60 years.”

Jamal Saghir, the World Bank’s director of energy and water, says he is unaware of any meetings that might have taken place with Kamen. “We get a lot of requests from inventors to endorse their products,” says Saghir. “The World Bank does not support proprietary technology. We support developing country governments and empower them to make choices.”

What Kamen is really railing against, though, is the conventional wisdom that governments need to build huge, centralized power plants or water sanitation facilities to economically address the problems at hand. That centralized approach might result in a lower cost per kilowatt or per clean liter of water, but it also requires a lot of capital, a lot of expertise, and a lot of pipes and wires.

There’s a lengthy interview with Dean Kamen here, which includes discussion of the generator/purifier program:

On that note, one of your current projects is using a small Stirling engine to produce electricity and purify water. Engineers have long been mesmerized by the Stirling’s theoretical efficiency, but frustrated by their failure to realize that efficiency while managing issues of size, control, and cost. What are DEKA’s plans for the Stirling?

I have had a life-long fascination with Stirling engines and with thermodynamics generally. But as you say, the Stirling has been fascinating scientists and engineers for well over 100 years, yet it has never been a competitive solution to most problems versus other kinds of heat engines out there, like steam engines, internal combustion engines, and gas turbines. Stirling engines are big relative to their energy density, expensive, hard to manufacture, etc. In short, they cannot compete with the power generators that are already a part of the infrastructure in the U.S. and other industrialized countries. However, there are a lot of places in the developing world that are waiting, and will continue to wait, for a top-down approach to provide power. But there is no infrastructure in place, and it will probably take 20 years, 30 years, 50 years, or longer before centralized power and electricity will be available in these places–if it ever happens–for reasons that have nothing to do with engineering or technology. The obstacles are social, financial, and political, but they are not technological. Our goal is to use a bottom-up approach to instantly get people on to the ladder of technology, beginning with getting them electricity in their homes and villages. This enables them to take care of their basic needs, attain a better quality of life, and start creating wealth. We defined the problem: they need a generator that runs on any fuel, is very reliable and essentially maintenance free, is able to generate sufficient power for a small village, and is small enough so that a couple of people can carry it around. If we had an engine that could do all that, it would be a big deal. We realized that in developing world environments, the Stirling, despite a number of problems that had to be solved with it, could really be the core of a bottom-up way to build distributed point-of-use power generation throughout the world. It was as much an insight into the practical realities of the situation as it was about the second law of thermodynamics.

Finally, here’s some clever marketing “Segway inventor drinks his own pee“.

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