those same idiots will be suing everyone who simply listens and remembers a piece of new music
They're already doing that and calling it "plagiarism lawsuits". See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music ("My Sweet Lord"), Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton ("Love Is a Wonderful Thing"), Gaye v. Thicke ("Blurred Lines"), Wolfe v. Led Zeppelin ("Stairway to Heaven"), and Ed Sheeran getting sued twice. This is not to mention other cases that you don't hear so much about because they're settled out of court: "Stay With Me" by Sam Smith is too close to "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty
The best one was John Fogerty getting sued for "Old Man Down The Road" sounding to much like "Green River" which he sold the rights to. "You sound too much like yourself!"
The theory of relativity wasn't that hard to comprehend. If the speed of light is a constant, time isn't. The only other answer is that all math is fucked.
Two facts: 1: The Theory of Relativity states that the space time continuum warps near strong gravitational forces and this causes GPS clocks to run slightly faster than they would on earth.
2: Waffles are good.
Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
Convection tower performance is very poor and the convection tower portion of the SHPEGS system accounts for less than 10% of the system output. It is still clean renewable power, but the convection tower wind turbine output is trivial. The chimney is there to allow a large volume of air to move across the heat exchangers efficiently and the wind turbine takes a slight advantage of the effect, but it isn't significant.
I wonder how this would be for growing winter crops as well
There is a lot of potential for integrating bio-methane which requires a very constant temperature as well as this Solar Hydrogen from methane production system. Algae farming also has a potential integration with the solar thermal storage.
Thanks. I'm looking for a number though.
I don't mean to avoid the efficiency question. Again, in an arid location with the majority of electrical usage for AC, Solar PV or Solar Thermal is simpler and probably more suitable. The cost/m2 of collectors is substantially cheaper in a thermal system, so I'm not sure what you are comparing. Marginal and poor land that isn't suitable for crop production or the roof of a Walmart isn't the cost factor, the solar collector is. The MIT group was able to get 1kW from 14m2 of trough collectors on a straight thermal system and the SHPEGS additions should improve on that.
There are also 2 heat sources in the SHPEGS system, solar and hot summer air along with two power generation systems, thermal and the wind turbine. In theory, the absorption system should improve not degrade the straight solar thermal system, so I would expect something better than 10% efficiency on the solar portion if you include the additional heat from the air. The conversion efficiency of the heat being extracted from the air is difficult to calculate. The energy cost is the energy going into the solution pump to pressurize the aqueous ammonia and there isn't the same direct cost in the volume of air being moved, in fact the more air that is moved the better the output of the wind turbine portion.
If you are comparing Solar PV, you need to account for battery cost and cut all the numbers by at least 50% to account for the daytime only output. Regardless of what is used for electrical storage, there are 3 months of the winter in Canada and the northern US where Solar PV isn't going to put out anything substantial and seasonal electrical storage isn't feasible.
There are plans to prototype it, actually as soon as I finish coaching my kids softball.:)
Questions I am hoping the prototype will answer:
The theory is that by using a Absorption Heat Transformer/heat pump to "upgrade" additional heat from the air, it will lower the amount of solar collector required for a given output and scale in a non-linear fashion. This adds a lot of complexity to a solar thermal system and although the absorption heat pump has been around for 100 years, it isn't that common of a technology and it's difficult to find experts in the area.
By using the heat transformer concept, the temperature can be raised to use a water steam turbine as opposed to a lower temperature and a organic rankine system. Water is more dense than lower boiling point fluids and in theory the turbine power output is higher. The question is whether the power going into the solution pump to pressurize the aqueous ammonia to raise it's temperature that high justifies the increased power out.
The negative buoyancy caused in the convection tower and it's fluid dynamics are difficult to model for someone that isn't a fluid dynamics engineer. In theory, the air intake of the tower can be orientated to prevailing winds, the heat exchangers can angle the air and a vortex can be created in the tower which will increase the angle of attack against the wind turbine. It's difficult to picture how this will work without a working prototype.
A dozen other things.
As far as complex, the cycle isn't much more complex than an absorption refrigerator found in most RV's. I have one in my camper that is 30 years old, never been serviced and works fine.
This is a very interesting project by a group of MIT grads that implemented a very cheap solar thermal system out of salvage automotive components (power steering pump, alternator, etc) for low cost deployment in developing countries.
The SHPEGS additions to this type of system (thermal storage, convection tower) could also be implemented cheaply from common materials and salvage parts.
A lot of the SHPEGS system inspiration came from the Drake Landing Solar Community project which is a district heating system using solar thermal collectors on the garage roofs and borehole thermal storage for structure heating.
For colder locations, there is a lot of value in the structure heating component of the SHPEGS system.
Solar PV is a different system. The SHPEGS design focus is base load electricity, cheap collectors and enhancing the solar thermal output with additional ambient heat from the air which will mean the collectors scale in a non-linear fashion. There is also a prevailing wind enhancement potential with the convection tower. I would think that both for simplicity and summer daytime operation in arid locations that Solar PV or a classic Solar Thermal system would be a better solution for output/m2 of collector.
At night or for most of the winter in Canada, Solar PV has little or no output and there isn't a comparison between systems.
FUD confusing open source with free software by unpaid programmers, making up windows server base numbers and referring to _AMP as "Visual Basic of open source" that pulled Linux along and what the programmers really want is to run their apps on Vista. Interoperability should only happen after a decade or so, because no one wants it anyway. A guy develops a 3d interface but can't figure out how that would work with Linux.
Just FUD, nothing happening here folks, keep moving along.
It's a demonstration and there were several grants and interest free loans, I also didn't account for panel degradation, interest, wind damage etc.
Anyway, the 1.1 million for 100kW is trivial. Even with these kind of numbers on a demonstration project, OptiSolar signed a deal for a 40MW Solar PV project in Sarnia on this same $0.42 contract. Optisolar doesn't actually have a commercial thin film Solar PV product.
The/. coverage Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant
Solar Two (not the same as Nevada Solar Two) was a heliostat central tower design.
The flat mirror fresnel idea that Khosla is investing in is between the two ideas. Rather than a solar trough, flat strip mirror heliostats are at ground level with the receiver pipes above.
The SEGS plants at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert have been operating since the 1980's and are the largest solar plants in the world producing 354 MW.
Nevada Solar One is 64MW of solar thermal (3rd largest solar plant) and set to come online this year.
This document details a lot of the 100 year history of solar thermal attempts.
SHPEGS is our not-for-profit design project to adapt solar thermal to moderate climates by combining it with geothermal and heat pump technology. There is more information and links here.
The Toronto Exibition Place 100kW Solar PV demonstration project cost $1.1 million and they have a mixture of panel vendors.
They estimated 22 years to reclaim the investment at $0.42/kWh under Ontario's Standard Offer Program. Which is allowing $0.42/kWh for PV and $0.11 for all other renewable systems.
The system has been online since last August and they should have a much better month this June, but the 100kW Solar PV installation poorest functional month was 1.8MWh (January) and best was 9MWh so far. At the $0.42/kWh this translates to $756-$3780 per month or 24-121 years to reclaim the investment. At $0.11/kWh this is $198-$990/month or 92-462 years to break even on the investment.
I would think the real annual output will land in the center and at the $0.42/kWh rate, they will reclaim the $1.1 million in around 40 years if the panels output doesn't degrade severely through that period.
In higher annual insolation areas like California and Hawaii with peak electrical usage due to AC, solar PV is getting better for low-maintenance installations like a Walmart or Google roof, when the PR factor is taken into account, but in Canada, it's a long way off from feasible due to the low winter insolation and "Twin Peaks" electrical load with the highest peak in February when solar PV has no real output.
SHPEGS is our attempt to design a more suitable renewable power system for Canada, Northern US and Europe.
My work has around 500 *nix servers with Solaris, HP (paRISC and Itanium), Linux and AIX. I support Oracle on HP, Solaris and AIX (4.3 and 5L). I don't think any of the platforms have much difference in stability issues. We have been consolodating the Oracle environment on AIX and although Oracle has been pushing Linux/x86 there is the issue of endian byte order in going to a non-RISC cpu. The environment is large and a complete changeover would be difficult and a mixed RISC/Intel environment is more difficult with physical database migration and transportable tablespaces. The Power5 is a good design, AIX 5L is reasonably stable and the Power6 coming out this summer is supposed to be clocked up to 5GHz, which is a big deal when you are licensing Oracle by the CPU.
Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.
There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.
The 40MW press release would be the largest Solar PV plant, but the Solar Thermal at Kramer Junction is 354MW and has been operating for over 20 years along with the other SEGS style systems. Nevada Solar One is 64MW and will be completed soon.
Solar Thermal Electric Generation was not included in the $0.42/kWh (only Solar PV), any solar thermal or hybrid installations under this program would only be eligible for the $0.11/kWh and the rules have several wordings around hybrid systems that make it unclear whether a solar thermal/geothermal hybrid would even qualify at all
After some more looking and reading the rules, they have blatantly advertised 40MW to claim "The Biggest" and get mediots to post their press release and create hype for their company, but the rules are clear on a 10MW limit.
OptiSolardoesn't actually have a commercial thin film PV product yet, but they have been hiring.
I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. - R. Buckminster Fuller GRUNCH of Giants, 1983
This program was intended for small power producers with a limit of 10MW. The 40MW is a press release to claim "The Biggest" and supposed to be built in 10MW stages. According to the rules there is a hard limit at 10MW. The $0.42/kWh was intended to provide a Solar PV cost study and these guys are trying to bend the rules to take advantage of the program. The 40MW will be difficult to do without getting a rule change.
The solar insolation in Sarnia is very low for 6 months of the year and non-existent at winter solstice with 8 hours of low angle daylight. Canada has 2 peaks in electrical usage (August and February) as opposed to a warmer climate with a single summer peak. In February there is no real output from a Solar PV panel and the EROEI of Solar PV in this location is 50% of locating the same panel in the Mojave desert. They would have to pick up the solar field every fall and snowbird it to Arizona for the winter for it to put out any power.
Solar Insolation at Sarnia in kWh/m2 on a 43degree panel (from above nasa link):
Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May. Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. avg. 1.892.67 3.30 4.21 4.92 5.16 5.19 4.85 4.21 3.18 1.971.60 3.60
The 40MW is peak output at noon on summer solstice. The plant is going to produce a lot less output for the rest of the year. They should rate output of intermittent power in MWh/day average and not in MW. MW makes sense for a coal or nuclear plant where the output is constant.
The SHPEGS project is an open renewable design project that is attempting to take advantage of the Canadian climate that has high summer solar insolation and cold winter temperatures and provide base-load renewable electricity and thermal storage from a direct/indirect hybrid solar collection system built with common materials.
I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money
or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive.
Computers/IT being a relatively recent technology, I think the patent problems are just starting. In thermodynamics, the patent system has allowed the steam engine to be re-patented weekly and there was prior art for the basic concept that substantially predates the patent system itself.
Yet Another Thermodynamic Cycle syndrome is just starting for IT and the center of the problem is not the patent system. The problems are that capitalism is unbridled and there is profit in litigation. I have a difficult time visualizing a patent system reform that will actually improve innovation because it never comes down to who is the inventor, it comes down to who has the resources to hire the most and best lawyers. There really isn't much point in attempting to obtain a patent if you have a good idea or product but don't you don't have a large corporation behind you. Either your idea is crap, you are so far ahead of your time no one will "get it" or a larger company will pick up on the idea. In whichever situation, a patent isn't going to help. I would think generally the type of person that invents anything truly innovative, isn't the type of person that wants to spend their life in a court room and dealing with the legal system.
I believe the Internet will eventually change this. If a good idea is spread very quickly, it reduces to a commodity very quickly. If one company "steals" your idea, many will. My opinion is that unless you want to spend your life in court, it's simpler to just publish your ideas in an open manner and then develop a business model around the sub-components and consulting. This is very similar to the Open Source vs. Proprietary software model. If you have a new idea that has value but you have minimal resources, you cannot show the profit of Microsoft, but you can be Red Hat.
Slashdot Mirror
those same idiots will be suing everyone who simply listens and remembers a piece of new music
They're already doing that and calling it "plagiarism lawsuits". See Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music ("My Sweet Lord"), Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton ("Love Is a Wonderful Thing"), Gaye v. Thicke ("Blurred Lines"), Wolfe v. Led Zeppelin ("Stairway to Heaven"), and Ed Sheeran getting sued twice. This is not to mention other cases that you don't hear so much about because they're settled out of court: "Stay With Me" by Sam Smith is too close to "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty
The best one was John Fogerty getting sued for "Old Man Down The Road" sounding to much like "Green River" which he sold the rights to. "You sound too much like yourself!"
The theory of relativity wasn't that hard to comprehend. If the speed of light is a constant, time isn't. The only other answer is that all math is fucked.
Two facts: 1: The Theory of Relativity states that the space time continuum warps near strong gravitational forces and this causes GPS clocks to run slightly faster than they would on earth. 2: Waffles are good.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
You could incorporate this idea into The SHPEGS concept.
The thermal storage would be deep enough to not interact with the surface or shallow groundwater. The Drake Landing project has some information. This is another research document on thermal storage.
There is a lot of potential for integrating bio-methane which requires a very constant temperature as well as this Solar Hydrogen from methane production system. Algae farming also has a potential integration with the solar thermal storage.
I don't mean to avoid the efficiency question. Again, in an arid location with the majority of electrical usage for AC, Solar PV or Solar Thermal is simpler and probably more suitable. The cost/m2 of collectors is substantially cheaper in a thermal system, so I'm not sure what you are comparing. Marginal and poor land that isn't suitable for crop production or the roof of a Walmart isn't the cost factor, the solar collector is. The MIT group was able to get 1kW from 14m2 of trough collectors on a straight thermal system and the SHPEGS additions should improve on that.
There are also 2 heat sources in the SHPEGS system, solar and hot summer air along with two power generation systems, thermal and the wind turbine. In theory, the absorption system should improve not degrade the straight solar thermal system, so I would expect something better than 10% efficiency on the solar portion if you include the additional heat from the air. The conversion efficiency of the heat being extracted from the air is difficult to calculate. The energy cost is the energy going into the solution pump to pressurize the aqueous ammonia and there isn't the same direct cost in the volume of air being moved, in fact the more air that is moved the better the output of the wind turbine portion.
I used 5% thermal to electrical efficiency for the calculations to be conservative, and generally 10% is used for binary geothermal plants.If you are comparing Solar PV, you need to account for battery cost and cut all the numbers by at least 50% to account for the daytime only output. Regardless of what is used for electrical storage, there are 3 months of the winter in Canada and the northern US where Solar PV isn't going to put out anything substantial and seasonal electrical storage isn't feasible.
The Toronto Exhibition Palace Live Solar PV Stats page has some historical data on Solar PV in winter in Canada.There are plans to prototype it, actually as soon as I finish coaching my kids softball. :)
Questions I am hoping the prototype will answer:- The theory is that by using a Absorption Heat Transformer/heat pump to "upgrade" additional heat from the air, it will lower the amount of solar collector required for a given output and scale in a non-linear fashion. This adds a lot of complexity to a solar thermal system and although the absorption heat pump has been around for 100 years, it isn't that common of a technology and it's difficult to find experts in the area.
- By using the heat transformer concept, the temperature can be raised to use a water steam turbine as opposed to a lower temperature and a organic rankine system. Water is more dense than lower boiling point fluids and in theory the turbine power output is higher. The question is whether the power going into the solution pump to pressurize the aqueous ammonia to raise it's temperature that high justifies the increased power out.
- The negative buoyancy caused in the convection tower and it's fluid dynamics are difficult to model for someone that isn't a fluid dynamics engineer. In theory, the air intake of the tower can be orientated to prevailing winds, the heat exchangers can angle the air and a vortex can be created in the tower which will increase the angle of attack against the wind turbine. It's difficult to picture how this will work without a working prototype.
- A dozen other things.
As far as complex, the cycle isn't much more complex than an absorption refrigerator found in most RV's. I have one in my camper that is 30 years old, never been serviced and works fine.This is a very interesting project by a group of MIT grads that implemented a very cheap solar thermal system out of salvage automotive components (power steering pump, alternator, etc) for low cost deployment in developing countries.
The SHPEGS additions to this type of system (thermal storage, convection tower) could also be implemented cheaply from common materials and salvage parts.A lot of the SHPEGS system inspiration came from the Drake Landing Solar Community project which is a district heating system using solar thermal collectors on the garage roofs and borehole thermal storage for structure heating.
For colder locations, there is a lot of value in the structure heating component of the SHPEGS system.It's fractional distillation and the heat is recovered from both the water and the ammonia. This is a good document on GAX Absorption Heat Pumps and the wikipedia Gas Absorption Refrigerator entry.
The step-by-step detail PDF outlines what is happening in the SHPEGS cycle along with the Flow Animation.
Ammonia/water is also not the only possible working pair, but it is commonly used in heat pumps and Industrial Heat Transformers and was used in the system to simplify explaining the concepts. A commercial absorption heat pump powered by a geothermal source with images and diagrams.
Solar PV is a different system. The SHPEGS design focus is base load electricity, cheap collectors and enhancing the solar thermal output with additional ambient heat from the air which will mean the collectors scale in a non-linear fashion. There is also a prevailing wind enhancement potential with the convection tower. I would think that both for simplicity and summer daytime operation in arid locations that Solar PV or a classic Solar Thermal system would be a better solution for output/m2 of collector. At night or for most of the winter in Canada, Solar PV has little or no output and there isn't a comparison between systems.
Horse
FUD confusing open source with free software by unpaid programmers, making up windows server base numbers and referring to _AMP as "Visual Basic of open source" that pulled Linux along and what the programmers really want is to run their apps on Vista. Interoperability should only happen after a decade or so, because no one wants it anyway. A guy develops a 3d interface but can't figure out how that would work with Linux. Just FUD, nothing happening here folks, keep moving along.
Anyway, the 1.1 million for 100kW is trivial. Even with these kind of numbers on a demonstration project, OptiSolar signed a deal for a 40MW Solar PV project in Sarnia on this same $0.42 contract. Optisolar doesn't actually have a commercial thin film Solar PV product. The /. coverage Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant
I have some real issues spelling "Exhibition" :)
Solar Two (not the same as Nevada Solar Two) was a heliostat central tower design. The flat mirror fresnel idea that Khosla is investing in is between the two ideas. Rather than a solar trough, flat strip mirror heliostats are at ground level with the receiver pipes above.
The SEGS plants at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert have been operating since the 1980's and are the largest solar plants in the world producing 354 MW.
Nevada Solar One is 64MW of solar thermal (3rd largest solar plant) and set to come online this year.
Stirling Energy Systems has a CPUC approved contract with SCE for a 500MW parabolic stirling solar thermal plant.
This document details a lot of the 100 year history of solar thermal attempts.
SHPEGS is our not-for-profit design project to adapt solar thermal to moderate climates by combining it with geothermal and heat pump technology. There is more information and links here.
Diagram of Compressed Air Storage Idea
They estimated 22 years to reclaim the investment at $0.42/kWh under Ontario's Standard Offer Program. Which is allowing $0.42/kWh for PV and $0.11 for all other renewable systems.
You can watch the live output stats (requires flash) of the Exibition Palace 100kWh installation in Toronto and see historical data.
The system has been online since last August and they should have a much better month this June, but the 100kW Solar PV installation poorest functional month was 1.8MWh (January) and best was 9MWh so far. At the $0.42/kWh this translates to $756-$3780 per month or 24-121 years to reclaim the investment. At $0.11/kWh this is $198-$990/month or 92-462 years to break even on the investment.
I would think the real annual output will land in the center and at the $0.42/kWh rate, they will reclaim the $1.1 million in around 40 years if the panels output doesn't degrade severely through that period.
In higher annual insolation areas like California and Hawaii with peak electrical usage due to AC, solar PV is getting better for low-maintenance installations like a Walmart or Google roof, when the PR factor is taken into account, but in Canada, it's a long way off from feasible due to the low winter insolation and "Twin Peaks" electrical load with the highest peak in February when solar PV has no real output.
SHPEGS is our attempt to design a more suitable renewable power system for Canada, Northern US and Europe.
Linux/x86 has forced IBM, Sun and HP to be competitive with much cheaper hardware and support and when pricing servers with 32GB+ of ram, there isn't much difference between Linux/x86/support and AIX/HPUX/Solaris and when you do TCO analysis, they are all very similar.
There has been a major drop in the high end *nix distributed computing environment pricing brought on by Linux, to the point where it isn't that much of a cost savings switching between Linux and HPUX/AIX/Solaris (or the other way). I don't agree that AIX is more stable than Linux, but AIX isn't that much more expensive anymore.
- The 40MW press release would be the largest Solar PV plant, but the Solar Thermal at Kramer Junction is 354MW and has been operating for over 20 years along with the other SEGS style systems. Nevada Solar One is 64MW and will be completed soon.
- Solar Thermal Electric Generation was not included in the $0.42/kWh (only Solar PV), any solar thermal or hybrid installations under this program would only be eligible for the $0.11/kWh and the rules have several wordings around hybrid systems that make it unclear whether a solar thermal/geothermal hybrid would even qualify at all
- After some more looking and reading the rules, they have blatantly advertised 40MW to claim "The Biggest" and get mediots to post their press release and create hype for their company, but the rules are clear on a 10MW limit.
- OptiSolar doesn't actually have a commercial thin film PV product yet, but they have been hiring.
See Open Source for Renewable Systems Reasoning for why Open Source will succeed in renewables...but Bucky Fuller said it best:
I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive.- R. Buckminster Fuller GRUNCH of Giants, 1983
Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May. Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. avg.
1.89 2.67 3.30 4.21 4.92 5.16 5.19 4.85 4.21 3.18 1.97 1.60 3.60
The SHPEGS project is an open renewable design project that is attempting to take advantage of the Canadian climate that has high summer solar insolation and cold winter temperatures and provide base-load renewable electricity and thermal storage from a direct/indirect hybrid solar collection system built with common materials.
- R. Buckminster Fuller GRUNCH of Giants, 1983
Yet Another Thermodynamic Cycle syndrome is just starting for IT and the center of the problem is not the patent system. The problems are that capitalism is unbridled and there is profit in litigation. I have a difficult time visualizing a patent system reform that will actually improve innovation because it never comes down to who is the inventor, it comes down to who has the resources to hire the most and best lawyers. There really isn't much point in attempting to obtain a patent if you have a good idea or product but don't you don't have a large corporation behind you. Either your idea is crap, you are so far ahead of your time no one will "get it" or a larger company will pick up on the idea. In whichever situation, a patent isn't going to help. I would think generally the type of person that invents anything truly innovative, isn't the type of person that wants to spend their life in a court room and dealing with the legal system.
I believe the Internet will eventually change this. If a good idea is spread very quickly, it reduces to a commodity very quickly. If one company "steals" your idea, many will. My opinion is that unless you want to spend your life in court, it's simpler to just publish your ideas in an open manner and then develop a business model around the sub-components and consulting. This is very similar to the Open Source vs. Proprietary software model. If you have a new idea that has value but you have minimal resources, you cannot show the profit of Microsoft, but you can be Red Hat.
You might have just invented the sail boat. :)