Remember how much the Segway didn’t sell? Just a rich boy’s toy.
Now the same guy wants to bring power & water to the penniless masses and strike a blow for democracy at the same time. Or something like that.
He’s designed machines, about the size of your household washer, that produce a consistent kilowatt of power and a thousand litres of water a day, so long as you have something to burn and a handy supply of raw sewage. The by-product of each would even help supply the other. At the moment each machine costs about $100,000 to make hand-tooled but his vision is to get that down to a grand or two and sell them to enterprising entrepreneurs in third-world villages all over the world. It’s worth reading the article just for the business model.
The altruistic idea of bringing civilization to the fringes is somewhat tempered by his capitalistic drive but I’ve always said capitalism is the father of invention. And this way the power would be in the hands of thousands of individuals rather than faceless environment-murdering corporations.