You've solved the World's energy problems, now what?

In My Humble Opinion
1

You’ve managed to completely independently build a device that could be made for every home and every car and solve the fossil fuel issue. Imagine Tony Stark’s arc generator - or maybe you figured out cold fusion. You’ve gotten your patent and lawyered up, but now what?

  1. Do you start selling these things one at a time to build up enough cash to go into full scale production?
    I like this option because I stay in control of my invention. But it would likely mean long hours and potentially threats on my life from competitors.

  2. Do you find someone to build it for you? What price do you put on the patent? Royalties?
    This would be the easiest. And I could potentially keep my anonymity. But, until the technology is proven, you probably wouldn’t get top dollar for the patent. You’d have to work something out so you’d get shares in the company or money for each unit sold.

  3. Something else?
    I haven’t figured out this new technology yet. But when I do, I need to be prepared. What should I do?

2

I don’t have to actually answer, right? My mere appearance
in the thread should be enough, I think.

3

I think you post your plans out on the internet so everyone can immediately access them, and trust that people will do right by you.

(Not that I would, but hey, it worked for Linus Torvald).

4

Sell the patent for “The Inigo Machine” for $50 million and free “The Inigo Machines” for life.

I’ll never need more than $50 million.

5

I would disseminate the plans throughout the internet under a public license. If one corporation holds free energy, their advantage over everyone else would be incredible, resulting in a monopoly that Microsoft and Wal-Mart could only dream about even if they banded together. Free dissemination means it’ll find its way into the hands of people best suited to rapid distribution, and everyone will begin developing practical models at the same time.

Sure, I could probably make more money than God off the patent if I chose to, but I think living in a world where Arc Reactors are as common as batteries is worth any amount of money.

6

I take every person on Earth for everything that I can get. If it can provide an infinite amount of energy, I’ll only be able to sell a limited number until demand is sated, so I charge out the ears for it.

Besides, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be much of a RandBot. If I’m going to be John Galt incarnated, I might as well act like him.

7

I’d sell it to the highest bidder.

Opening bid: Wyoming.

8

+1

9

Well, I like the idea of free energy for everyone. But, I also like the idea of being stupid filthy rich. That would likely mean that I’d have to manufactuer the product myself. Sell the widgets at a reasonable cost, so everyone could afford them and reap the (modest) profits.

I certainly wouldn’t want WallyWorld or Microsoft to get ahold of it.

And Skald is not getting his hands on the patent. Unless I can be his very well compensated tech advisor when he takes over the world. My job would require me to not tell anyone else how my machine works.

10

I’ll open-source it and spread the plans far and wide; I don’t have the skills or connections to commercialise it. This will also take the pressure off me as a possible target of assassination.

11

I doubt it. That statement strikes me, on a gut level, as being like “there are only a few dozen coal mines that need water pumped out of them, so I better charge a lot for this steam engine”. I bet that the demand for energy is pretty damned insatiable. Energy use begets energy use. Making it cheaper will only mean that people will put it to more and better uses.

It’s interesting. Depending on how cheap and easy this technology is to manufacture, it’s entirely possible that releasing the plans free would result in your quality of life rising faster than if you controlled their release.

12

If everyone had gigawatts at their disposal, I suspect that waste heat building up on and around the earth would soon become a problem. But hey! We’d have gigawatts at our disposal, so all sorts of people would be heading into space, building habitats, mining the moon to create a sunshade, etc, etc.

13

Every Gulf State would issue a fatwah on my sorry ass in an instant, so I would go with the “desiminate everywhere free” route. Then start organizing a Moon base project.

14

Missed the edit window: Seeing as how the major problem in most places is lack of potable water for drinking and irrigation, I might also set up companies to build and distribute desalinization plants all over the world. With unlimited energy available, these would transform the world for people that really need it.

15

I wouldn’t patent it first. It’s too big. The money to be made off this thing depends on being first to get it into production and start selling units. People will bust, ignore, circumvent or otherwise bypass your patent if everyone’s starting from the same place. Patent it just before you start shipping, and count on your head start more than on your lawyers.

You’ll need investors, and a manufacturing plant with a LOT of spare capacity up and ready, before you let on how it works. (Which you’ll have to do, to patent it.) So you need a public demonstration that maintains your secret, and for safety’s sake, your anonymity as well.

So. A few classified ads appear that a certain brewha has invented a free energy device, and on April 1st he will begin to boil the sea with a constant 100kW at such-and-such a location. For a month. The device will be a sealed “black box” which will destroy itself if tampered with or stolen. The guys supervising the demo do not how the thing works, and do not know the identity of brewha or how to contact him.

A truck appears on a pier. A sealed metal box in the back, about a cubic yard in volume, is suspended in the air from a frame by woven flat strops. Two arc-welder cables snake into the water, where they connect to an industrial heating element. A screen of chickenwire in the sea prevents anyone or anything approaching the hot water zone.

The sea boils. And boils. And boils. Local press turn up, and national press looking for silly April 1st stories. Engineers turn up, and examine the box. No obvious inlets or outlets, no noise. A clamp meter confirms 200 amperes in the cables, at 500 volts.

People wonder how the trick is done. The best bet is a sealed fuel cell. A week goes by. The sea still boils. By now, the thing has put out as much energy as burning 2800lb of gasoline at 100% efficiency. It is not a sealed fuel cell.

People look more closely. Is power being sent in through the strops? Is induction being used? Geiger counters are brought into play, as are infra-red cameras. Smoke is used to see if the box has hidden intakes and exhausts. People check for microwave beams. The four guys on rotating watch who are looking after the thing tell all they know, which is not a lot. They were contacted and paid anonymously. PIs and intellignence services are put into action. Governments wonder whether to seize the box and see if the bomb disposal people can get into it without blowing it. The bomb disposal people advise them that a really carefully booby-trapped device is a very poor bet.

A month goes by. The guys supervising the demo pack it up and drive it away to a pick-up site, where a helicopter removes it to whereabouts unknown.

At this point, you shouldn’t have too much trouble attracting investors. Choose wisely and be VERY careful!

Course, if it IS a hoax, you could still make a fair bit of money that month on the markets…

16

You’d guarantee my interest, just for the ready-cooked free seafood.

17

However it was managed, something like that is quite likely to end up getting a lot of people hurt. If you open-source it, technically, that means anyone can make one and be self-sufficient for energy, but it also means that those agencies currently in existence with sufficient manufacturing capacity can make them in almost unlimited quantity, and have almost unlimited capacity to do whatever they want.

At best, it would be a very uneasy time - governments could use their unlimited free energy resources to massively scale up weapons production - and knowing the others could do the same, they might feel somewhat obliged to.

At worst, it would be an all-out scramble to acquire what you can before someone bigger and more powerful gets it.

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely - and that’s what this is - absolute power (at least to the biggest player).

18

I’d open source it anonymously, in the hopes that someone, sometime will actually build one. I expect the energy companies to come down on me like a hammer if they know who I am; doing everything they can to discredit me and suppress the device. For that matter, after publishing anonymously I’d buy a gun to shoot myself with if they traced me anyway and sent the government after me; I have no desire to be dragged off to a CIA torture prison somewhere.

I doubt there’s any way I’d ever see any profit from it if I tried and even if they declined to do anything violent; most likely I’d end up massively in debt from legal fees from spurious lawsuits and homeless. Or if I was really lucky, all the profits would go to whomever agreed to build the device and not me. In the real world the actual inventor seldom makes much from his invention these days, even when they don’t have a huge industry and it’s near puppet government trying to crush them.

19

Hey, it’s no worse than your average black smoker.

As an aside, since you’ve successfully finished your “nail jelly to a tree” project, I’d like to see you have a go at a double blind, “lighter fuel used or not” barbeque trial! Just a suggestion…