The Clean Energy Innovator’s Dilemma

Are you one of the innovators that will disrupt the unsustainable energy industries and lead the clean energy revolution? The innovator’s dilemma is that established companies can’t develop the truly disruptive innovations that clean energy needs to transform the energy industry from the bottom up. I hope HOMER and this site empowers all of the innovators who are perfecting applications of clean energy starting with the smallest applications that have been neglected by the energy industries.

It is the applications themselves, not the underlying clean energy technologies, that are truly disruptive. Developing the fundamental technologies of clean energy is a capital-intensive process with long lead times. That is a task for large companies, as are central station deployments of clean energy, such as large wind farms and solar thermal power plants. It is the small scale applications that HOMER users are working on that will be the trail blazers for systems that rely primarily on solar, wind, and load management. These are more in tune with the inherently decentralized clean energy resources. They need to be custom designed to that application’s particular loads and resources.

The traditional energy industries and project development processes are unsuited to serve the needs of small scale applications. The classic argument is that the transaction costs associated with managing an energy project from design through construction, financing, and operation and maintenance support do not scale with project size, so large projects are required to cover those costs. Smaller projects need more efficient processes. As a design tool that can be used by anyone, HOMER does not need an expensive team of engineers.

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