Sometime in the next month or two I will be going to Ghent to take a
workshop from Casa Calida (http://www.casacalida.be), which teaches
people how to construct low-cost timber-and-strawbale homes. I suspect
they will be quite interested in practical solutions for solar
electricity and heat, and I'm interested in finding out more about the
Butterfly for my own house project.

Cheers,
--mlp

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Andrius Kulikauskas<ms@...> wrote:
>
>
> Mark, Thank you for inviting us to work with your business
> http://www.renewableswest.com I share with more groups so that we might
> give serious thought. Please keep us posted. Your Solar Rover is
> relevant for Ricardo, Pamela McLean's and Folabi Sunday's discussion of
> how to power an IT centre in rural Nigeria. I have created a wiki page:
> http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?RenewablesWest
> and through that page's metadata I included Renewables West in our Shop
> With Us network http://www.shopwithus.org
> Thank you to Leon Benjamin for his idea and phrase "winning by sharing"
> http://www.winningbysharing.net
> Andrius Kulikauskas, Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt, ms@...
>
> Mark Roest wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Mark Roest <marklroest@...
>> <mailto:marklroest@...>> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Janet, Andrius and All,
>>
>> Last Sunday I spent several hours at the Maker Fair (see Make
>> Magazine's website) and afterward discussing his family of
>> inventions for sustainability, and the associated business
>> opportunities. I thought of you all, and this seems like a
>> good point to introduce it.
>>
>> Jon is the head of Kyoto, Free is the Sun,
>> www.kyoto-energy.com <http://www.kyoto-energy.com>. I would
>> like to invite discussion with you all about setting up one or
>> more distributorships (larger scale) and / or dealerships
>> (local level) to retail his product line. The Kyoto Family
>> product group is particularly appropriate for small social
>> ventures created by and around both Independent Thinkers and
>> mutual support groups. This will generate real revenues, and
>> it will also pave the way to creating complex solar businesses
>> -- look at the Butterfly, which generates 800 watts per panel,
>> plus 400 degree Celcius air and 70 degree C water from cooling
>> the panels (it's a concentrating collector, 12 feet long, and
>> tracks the sun on two axes!). That business can create
>> revenues that can be the capital for building the houses he
>> designed, which will sell for $1000 per 100 square foot (9
>> square meters) module, which can be arranged 4 around a
>> central space, which needs floor and roof to make a 5th module
>> -- 500 square feet of high-tech living space, with
>> eco-utilities, for $5000.
>>
>> Please let me know if you would like to participate in
>> planning this social business venture. David Alan Foster,
>> David's employer, and I are also building a solar sales
>> business, Renewables West, which can source and sell globally;
>> see www.renewableswest.com <http://www.renewableswest.com>.
>> That is probably the vehicle we will use to work with Jon.
>>
>> Jon has a franchising system to make learning and managing
>> relatively easy, but the minimum container-load shipments and
>> Jon's habit of making products that start flat for shipping,
>> mean large-budget purchases -- probably on the order of
>> $50,000 to $150,000. That means we need to, and have the
>> opportunity to, aggregate orders from multiple dealers and
>> distributors, as long as we can cover the financing and get
>> the loads broken down and safely shipped to their
>> destinations. Who has more ideas and resources?
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Mark Roest
>>
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Mark Roest <marklroest@...
> <mailto:marklroest@...>> wrote:
> Hello All!
>
> Sorry, I forgot to mention that Jon also set up a carbon credits
> operation, so the cost of the energy saving and producing hardware can
> be recovered from selling them to people in Germany, and he also has
> financing, although I don't know the details yet. In other words, this
> thing is set up to succeed, and to empower low-income populations to
> succeed too -- in fact, that is his purpose in doing it in the first place!
>
> So do you want to make a difference with something that will go global,
> while empowering holistichelping and your other groups?
>
> Please let me know, and give me a sense of the scale you think you can
> operate on, by direct email, as well as posting: MarkLRoest@...
> <mailto:MarkLRoest@...>.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
> -----------------
>
> Hello All again:
>
> By the way, I realized that some will ask what the relationship of my
> communication is to the posting: I responded to the phrase, "winning by
> sharing"!, because that is what I am seeking here, along with the others
> in the network in the San Francisco Bay area.
>
> Regards,
>
> Mark
>
>