Joshua M. Pearce is the John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation at the Thompson Centre for Engineering Leadership & Innovation. He holds appointments at Ivey Business School, the top ranked business school in Canada and the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Western University in Canada, a top 1% global university. At Western he runs the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) research group. His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and to reduce poverty. His research spans areas of engineering of solar photovoltaic technology, open hardware, and distributed recycling and additive manufacturing (DRAM) using RepRap 3-D printing. He wrote the Open-Source Lab and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.
Authored Comments
I absolutely agree - Open Science is really taking hold --particularly for younger scientists -- see for example the open data at the Open Science Framework https://osf.io/
But it is just not limited to data -- It also seems like every wee a new open scientific hardware project comes out - see http://www.appropedia.org/Open-source_Lab#Examples
As nearly all businesses now rely on electricity - and the price of distributed generation is often competitive in terms of levelized cost of electricity - -it is time to take a good hard look at the economics of photovoltaic systems and cogen. Both can make a strong case on business as usual economics - and the increased resilience in the face of a disaster is a major bonus.
See: https://www.academia.edu/1484968/A_Review_of_Solar_Photovoltaic_Leveliz…
http://www.cospp.com/articles/print/volume-13/issue-4/features/chp-gain…