POD Net Plan
Whole System Entrepreneurial Initiative
POD Net (POD Enterprise Network)
by Sola Roof inventor, Richard Nelson
1. Summary: Sola Roof is an Open Source ( under our Creative Commons Public License) collaboration, engaging communities/teams in many locations and several countries where the first "POD Pioneers" will co-create and build the POD, a “vertical farm”, that will generate a global grassroots movement for a local, regenerative food/water/energy solution, with a viral learning/sharing growth strategy. The Life POD is appropriate for households and for new Eco Habitat. The Agri POD is appropriate for commercial food enterprise - empowering the resurgence of the 21st Century Family Farm that, in itself, is capable of restoring balance to earth's ecosystems - even with human population peaking above 9 to 10 billion we will all live in harmony with nature; and with the end of hunger and poverty, humanity shall have a real chance to thrive in unity and peace.
2. POD Net answers the need for individual and collective action on urgent global crisis surrounding the nexus of Food/Energy/Water - the FEW essentials for human health and wellbeing - in simple yet powerful ways that are both disruptive and constructive and people everywhere are ready and literally hungry for this change. We will get things on a new path by calling for action by "POD Pioneers" who will inspire people everywhere to activate POD Works, as cooperatives to protect their own families/communities - only such viral, grassroots change can hope to avert global disaster - avoiding the nightmare scenarios (see: Closing The Hunger Gap) and building the future of our dreams - a world of abundance for all.
3. Sola Roof has been first applied to growing organic food and to collect and purify water. We have the goal of establishing a regenerative pattern of Eco Living where organic nutrients are recycled into growing our food and where we would live in solar homes, the ultimate Life POD, that are self-reliant for heating, cooling and energy. This is possible because we now have the technology required dedicated into an Open Source collaborative environment, a Creative Commons, where a multitude of talented and motivated people will gather, who have between them an abundance of skills and intelligence to apply to achieving our goal through working together in a local-to-global COOP. This member-owned COOP opens a transparent channel for the people to take collective responsibility to develop and implement the solutions to the problems that businesses, governments and institutions and leadership of all kinds have failed to deliver.
4. The POD solutions are accessible for non-commercial use and benefit of all people. Home owners, including "Motivated Moms" can implement the Life POD technology to build self reliant gardens at home; with the Life POD in backyards and schoolyards to provide plentiful food, pure water and abundant energy from the ambient solar, earth and water resources on a regenerative basis. Commercial POD Preneurs, as members, benefit from POD Works supply of Sola Roof branded components and have an obligation to register their Commercial Use under our Creative Commons Public License, which requires 1)Attribution, 2)Share-Alike and, 3) Pay It Forward of 1% of related revenue to humanitarian action. 20 to 40% of individual POD Works & POD Preneurs profits are ploughed back into the development and expansion of POD Net operations around the world.
Communities will benefit from the savings achieved in reduction of "industrial food" dependency and the related outflow of currency that will instead circulate locally, producing distributed wealth rather than capital concentration. Every locality will be more self-sufficient with natural food, clean energy and pure water; attaining security even in the face of Climate Change and toxic environment threats that are now unavoidable. Our internet community encourages people to take action to help other people; including our Pay It Forward initiative to bridge the gaps that exist between have and have-not communities, assisting POD Works to be adopted by the homeless and by refugee communities that have been dislocated by natural or man made disasters.
If applied universally to building construction, Sola Roof technology will provide society the benefit of the mitigation of CO 2 accumulation in the global atmosphere, which will alleviate the seriousness and frequency of weather related disasters. With our "cool roof" solution, urban locations will find a reduction in the Heat Island Effect?, which is unfortunately magnifying the problems of Global Warming in our cities. Rural areas will find that the reduced burden of the human CO 2 footprint will relieve pressures for the destructive exploitation of “unconventional” natural resources so that more positive, restorative activities, including reforestation and Eco Tourism?, may become the occupation of those living outside of urban areas. Those in close proximity to wild lands will live in ecological harmony with the natural environment with the goal of zero emissions and waste generation as a practical objective. Thus the environment and the beautiful web of life on this planet will be protected and biodiversity will be enhanced by eliminating the need of mono-crop agriculture and forestry.
5. How can Sola Roof and the POD Net Plan be distinguished from existing "sustainable development" initiatives? As a regenerative technology for Food/Energy/Water - the FEW essentials for human health and wellbeing - POD Net is a very unique enterprise solution. Our answer to energy is not a costly photovoltaic solar technology but is a Closed Ecological Environment solution where the solar radiant energy spectrum is converted to biomass and pure water with algae and plant cultures and cost is minimized. Our method provides a transparent roof, with integrated Liquid Bubble Insulation - a process that is the key to reducing heating and cooling loads by 40 and 20 times, respectively, thus enabling an operational surplus of clean energy to be generated in a process that is reducing atmospheric CO 2. Absolutely no Fossil Energy is required for operations in any climate from extreme cold winters to hot-arid subtropics or hot-humid tropics, where the Liquid Solar process can combine with Bubble Shading to end the huge demand for electic power for air-conditioning.
Explain how it surpasses previous or current solutions: There are no technologies on the horizon that can achieve what the Sola Roof can accomplish - and do it at such a low cost, supporting profitable replication. Our method is not just low energy - it produces a substantial net energy output on a sustainable basis. Therefore our built environments (homes, and potentially, most buildings) will go from being the cause of more fossil energy consumption than the entire transport sector to being a producer of sufficient liquid fuel to fuel the transport sector with Bio Fuel. Water is also a limiting factor for failing agriculture practices based on mono-crop, annual grain crops (approximately 5 billion hectares) that now supplies 80% of food to the "consumer economies" (consisting of 60% directly to processed food and 20% as feed for factory farms). With both the petrochemical and fresh water inputs depleted to exhaustion there is desperation in these industrial sectors to now exploit "unconventional" remaining resources, including the devastation of the world's tropical rain forests. The so called "sustainable development" fostered by authorities, including the UNDP/WTO, enable vested interests to accelerate destructive, dead-end policies to the ultimate, predicable global grain crop collapse, risking a human die-off, and risk the probability of an extinction event for all life on earth. I assert that the global adoption of the POD Net solutions (see the White Paper, “closing the hunger gap”) will avert this projected devistation to people and planet.
6. The Sola Roof Wiki is now in place at www.solaroof.org and we are now supporting a network of pioneering individuals to build projects with a Crowd Funding strategy. The Sola Roof Community is working within a wider Open Eco Community that is emerging on the Internet. At several locations we are establishing, with POD Pioneers, exemplar Agri POD projects to support the development and implementation of POD Works as hubs of activity in localities all over the world. These will be centers for training, learning, research and demonstration that will be a catalyst for the growth of an Open Source economy. In 2015 the goal is push ahead with our POD Works to build a strong global Public/Private network, supporting the birth of a global COOP, headquartered in Iceland, by 2016. At the same time we are engaging with businesses who find our Open Source environment to be harmonious with their operations to build a Social Enterprise Network called SE Net that includes the Sola Roof Foundation. The strong base of the pyramid of our economically powerful movement will be family and community based POD Pioneers (in the future, millions of POD Preneurs) as family farm enterprises that have been formed intentionally to participate in our Social Enterprise Network or existing businesses that are adopting the Triple Bottom Line (people/planet/prosperity) management priorities.
7. Richard Nelson, as inventor, is gifting the POD to humanity, which, as it goes viral, enables everyone, everywhere to have access to all 5 Kingdoms of LIFE, with their important living food benefits, super-nutrients, cosmetic, healing medicinal extracts and metabolites to prevent and to cure disease. In addition, creating “sacred space”, and to work, live or play in the Blue Green environment of the POD and Eco POD is, in itself, healing. The atmosphere within is clean (safe from contamination) and rejuvenating with abundant oxygen and regulated humidity/temperature that is continuously refreshed by the plants. The holistic design and purpose of the Sola Roof inventions and design is the regeneration of life, support of families and rebirth of authentic communities of freedom, social cooperation, education through learning/sharing as we co-create a new humanKind, new Earth, and art of living in harmony with nature.
8. In the EU, the Sola Roof technology has attracted a significant and broad level of support, in the form of a Public/Private Partnership in Norway, which has won the support of the Eco Innovation program awarding the EU consortium a grant of over 800K euro for the construction/operation/testing of 4 Pilot Projects and 1 Demonstration (community scale) Project in 4 countries. There are many international partners for change and our global collaboration is reaching the level of super-credibility. While a few existing sites have “gone dark” and are not respecting the ethical obligations of the CCPL under which access and use of Sola Roof is granted, we sincerely believe they will grow in understanding of the need for “working openly”. Therefore, the parallel launch of a minimum of 12 POD Pioneers in locations all around the world, will turn the tide on the “pirating” of our Open Source knowhow and this will reduce the confusion that surrounds the adoption and use of Sola Roof at this critial time when all of humanity needs to discover heart coherence and act in global unison.
9. Recognizing the urgency of the human & planetary situation, due to the acceleration of Global Warming and potential for abrupt ecosystem collapse, I call for a rapid response by Angel Investors & Impact Investors, and invite their participation as Co Missioners. The enlistment of Co Missioners will proceed in parallel with several crowdfunding campagns that will enable POD Pioneers to be successfully funded and to thereby seed America and the world with exemplar Life POD & Agri POD projects. Scaling up to supply Sola Roof Vertical Farming projects in multiple countries/climates is a very challenging stage of innovation. What is important is that we don't "try" but that we have a plan that is solid and will be "over-the-top" successful through the power of our combined global talent. Our crowdfunding campaigns will be powerfully attractive when most people have confidence in Sola Roof as a known technology with clear benefits and proven financial rewards. Also, we must consider that POD Pioneers and POD Works teams will be formed by families who want innovative answers to food security concerns in communities that are anxious to have replicable solutions for good, local, fresh, safe food.
Therefore, our preparation and startup of a crowdfunding campaign is geared to confirm and present these facts by showcasing the "exemplar projects", which lead the way. Crowdfunding campaigns will enable a wave of POD Pioneers to be successfully funded and to thereby seed America and the world with exemplar Life POD & Agri POD projects. Scaling up Open Source manufacturing to supply Sola Roof Vertical Farming projects in multiple countries/climates is a very challenging stage of innovation. What is important is that we don't "try" but that we have a plan that is solid and will be "over-the-top" successful through the power of our combined global talent. Our crowdfunding campaigns will be powerfully attractive when most people have confidence in Sola Roof as a known technology with clear benefits and proven financial rewards. Also, we must consider that POD Pioneers and POD Works teams will be formed by families who want innovative answers to food security concerns in communities that are anxious to have replicable solutions for good, local, fresh, safe food.
Richard Nelson, inventor, has been building successful Sola Roof projects for 3 decades, however the technologies have not yet broken into the mainstream, and remain largely unknown and unrecognized. Since shifting focus from industrial use to dedicate his time to the development of the family/community applications of Sola Roof, the "vertical farm" structure of the Agri POD design has made steady progress. The first POD type "Proof of Concept" was implemented with collaborators in Norway, which paved the way, in 2012, to win an 800K euro grant for the replication by the University of Poznan in Poland, with financial support for three other countries to implement Agri POD pilot projects. With the Sola Roof contract to deliver an Agri POD in Vermont, Georgia and California, the Sola Roof platform for effective solar building design now is gaining credibility in America; and, we see more POD Pioneers bubbling up in many forward thinking communities around the world.