Modularity, Standardization & Scalability

Scarcity Zero's mission of building abundance is accomplished by amplifying power generation to the point where energy and critical resources can be inexpensively produced to indefinite volumes. Such a goal has been elusive throughout history, but it is today achievable by deploying the best power technologies we have available as cooperative systems that each play to their greatest strengths in a framework that is far more capable than the sum of its standalone parts.

While this approach is ultimately made possible by recent advances in automated and high-precision manufacturing, its mindset is founded on three core concepts: standardization, modularity and scalability.

Standardization is a way of building something to a universal standard that's adopted society-wide. For example: because we standardized electrical outlets, it allows millions of different electrical devices to each be powered through the same type of plug.

Modularity is a way of deploying a system that features the ability to rapidly change configuration through a standardized means. A good example of this can be found in Legos™: each Lego can fasten to another Lego using the same standardized method, but everything from simple toys to architectural masterpieces[1] can built from pieces that modularly fasten the exact same way.

Scalability is the ability of a system to rapidly change in size or sophistication. Let's say we identify a method to install enough solar panels to power a house. How easily could that method power 10 houses? 100,000 houses? 10 million houses? The more scalable that method is, the easier those questions can be answered affirmatively. This becomes all the more true if the concepts of standardization and modularity are applied.

Standardization and modularity allow us to take a technology and deploy it in a way that can be mass-produced and rapidly scaled, providing easy replacement and driving down costs. Our manufacturing capabilities today allow us to apply these concepts to more more sophisticated systems - especially those within power generation and resource production.

To see why this is important, consider that average age of an American nuclear power plant is 41 years. That means a significant portion of them were designed and built without the aid of a calculator[3]. The same is true with much of the power and resource infrastructure within our society. Yet while those systems use different fuels and work different ways, nearly all share a common similarity in that each of them were designed as unique entities that were made to order.

Our manufacturing capabilities can now allow us to to mass-produce power and resource systems like we do other complex systems like commercial aircraft - on automated assembly lines using standardized, interchangeable parts.

Instead of spending 10 years and $25 billion to expand the capacity of a nuclear power plant, we can instead mass-manufacture Small Modular Reactors (SMR) as identical iterations of type-certified product models and deliver them by road, air or rail.

Instead of designing desalination and hydrogen production as standalone facilities, these functions can be contained in portable modules that are engineered by design to be powered by the waste heat of Small Modular Reactors or excess electricity of municipal solar power.

Instead of looking at power and resource infrastructure as isolated systems, we can deploy them as cooperative modules that work together in a cohesive ecosystem.

These capabilities can not only change the fundamentals of our approach to energy and resources, they allow us to adopt a far more expansive mindset. Rather than seeking to identify individual efficiency improvements within unique systems, we can instead overhaul the foundations on which our means of energy generation and resource production is built upon.

To see why this makes sense, let's say we were tasked with answering the following questions:

1. What would be required to build a power facility in mid-coastal California that generates 300 megawatts of electricity, desalinates 40 million gallons of seawater and produces two metric tons of hydrogen per day?
2. With that known, how easily could we upgrade that facility’s desalination capacity to 60 million gallons, add on another ½ ton of hydrogen production and 100 megawatts more electricity?
3. In case the upgrades in task #2 exceed an allocated budget, what deliverables would respectively meet 35% and 75% of this target?
4. How much land would this require at what size of building envelope - and what terrain limitations would apply?
5. All aspects considered, what’s the overnight cost of these deployments with a high degree of certainty – plus or minus no more than 5% - mindful of all regulatory and permitting aspects?

In a world where energy systems are unique and made to order, the presence of these very questions sustains the business models of global consulting companies. Their answers take months to derive and by themselves can cost six to seven figures.

Yet in a world where we can rapidly manufacture identical type-certified systems to a modular standard, their capabilities and potential to integrate with other systems built in the same capacity becomes a known quantity. Everything from power requirements and performance specifications to unit lifetime and physical footprint can be granulized and queried with the click of a mouse. In such circumstances, those questions could be answered in minutes - leading to purchase orders and deployment strategies that can be executed in days.

Standardized modularity can also play important additional roles. By designing power systems to couple together using a standardized method, it becomes straightforward to integrate cogeneration with applicable elements of system engineering. Cogeneration is the concept of diverting waste heat energy from one technology to power the functions of others (such as using a power plant's heat exchangers to desalinate seawater, extract hydrogen from water or capture carbon from the atmosphere).

These auxiliary resource-producing functions are currently energy intensive and thus expensive, but when powered primarily by waste heat they can occur at scale with minimal overhead - enabling our power infrastructure to efficiently generate energy while also producing resources in the same footprint.

This will do to energy and resource production what technology has done to most other systems that we deploy in similar capacities: increase availability, lower prices, and advance quality over time. The result is an infrastructural capability to provide energy and resource abundance as a function of system design that can be scaled to a point where scarcity as we know it is made effectively irrelevant.