Infrastructure should be understandable by the people who depend on it.
Thelvanor, PBC is being formed to build a long-term stack of software, hardware, and services around one test: can an ordinary person, a school, or a town council read what the thing does, how much energy it uses, and what it costs, and check the numbers themselves?
The problem, in one paragraph.
Data centers have become the industrial plants of the intelligence age, and their electricity demand is now a public question. U.S. data centers used about 4.4% of national electricity in 2023, with projections of 6.7% to 12% by 2028. The decisions about where that power goes, what it buys, and who bears the cost are made at a scale and in a vocabulary most of the public cannot audit. That gap is a governance problem before it is an engineering one.
Three commitments.
These are the public benefits the corporation will be chartered to pursue. They are written to be checked, not admired.
- 01
Measure before claiming.
Every quantitative statement Thelvanor publishes carries an evidence grade: verified, plausible, or speculative. A datasheet is a claim. A measurement is evidence. The build log keeps them in separate columns.
- 02
Publish in plain language.
Designs, costs, and results are written so that a sixth grader can follow the first rung and a doctoral committee can argue with the last. Papers are open access. Code is open source.
- 03
Build at a scale people can own.
The first product is a data center that costs less than a used laptop, runs on one solar panel, and can be opened with a wrench. What a community can afford, it can also inspect.
Why a keg.
Because it is the smallest sealed, weather-tight, thermally conductive enclosure that costs about $130 new, and because a bright orange keg on a stand in a field makes the question concrete. People ask what it is. The answer, a data center, and the follow-up, how much power does it use, is the conversation the company exists to have. The keg is a classroom first and a product second.
What comes after Keg-1 is not decided and will not be announced before Keg-1 has data. The candidate research questions are on the research page.
What this page is not.
It is not a product roadmap, a fundraising deck, or a forecast. Thelvanor has no revenue, no employees, and no measurements yet. The corporation is forming in Texas with a $500 formation budget. This statement will be revised when the charter is filed and again when the first phase closes. Version history lives in the repository.