MANIFESTO

At 5:46:52 a.m. on Tuesday, January 17, 1995, power, phones, gas, water, and transport all stopped at once. The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake.

From that day on, we came to understand, in a very physical way, that what we had called “everyday life” was not guaranteed at all.

In 2025, thirty years will have passed since that morning. The architecture of Personal Energy® — the design principles of autonomy, distribution, and asynchrony — grew inevitably out of this experience.

In January 2011, just after we released the first Personal Energy unit, the Great East Japan Earthquake and one of the largest nuclear accidents in history struck.

Those scenes forced a single, sharp question upon us:

“No infrastructure should ever be placed above human life.”

The words “made in KOBE” are our message from those who survived, to the society that comes next.

Today’s energy and information systems are huge and complex, yet their core structure is surprisingly simple:

• Centralized control
• Long-distance transmission
• Concentration of power in a few large players
• Deep dependence on international politics, military power, and finance

This kind of single-pole concentration looks efficient on paper, but every time we face disaster or war, its fragility is exposed.

1. When the core stops, everything stops.
   Whether the cause is natural disaster, accident, geopolitical shock, or a cyberattack, the result is the same: everyday life and industry stop together.
2. Consumers are not allowed to become producers.
   Energy and information are treated as something “provided” from above. Regions and individuals have rarely been given the freedom to choose or create their own infrastructure.
3. The value of life and the value of the economy have been inverted.
   When local communities and health are sacrificed “for the sake of the economy”, something fundamental has gone wrong.
4. We are over-exposed to geopolitical risk.
   Fuels, minerals, equipment, entire infrastructures — many of them are directly tied to global tensions, and so is our social stability.

And today, it is not only the power grid that is fragile. The giant “information grid” has also become a single point of failure that can paralyze society when it stops.

Modern civilization has been designed too much on the assumption that systems “will not stop.” What we need now is a civilization that assumes systems do stop — and is built so that it does not collapse when they do.

The future we are aiming for is clear: every energy consumer becomes an energy producer.

For us, this is not just a slogan, but a quiet attempt to rewrite the design principles of modern civilization.

• Energy is not just something you “buy”.
• Homes, businesses, and communities can have their own infrastructure.
• When these small, self-owned infrastructures connect, a new kind of social foundation emerges.

Personal Energy® is an infrastructure designed for this future — the next-generation “personal grid” optimized for each site and each user.

Personal Energy® is built on three core principles:

1. Autonomous.
   The ability to operate without external support — the smallest unit of self-sufficiency needed to sustain life.
2. Distributed.
   A structure in which failures remain local instead of taking down the whole system. A flexible, “anti-fragile” way of organizing infrastructure.
3. Asynchronous.
   Freedom from the need to align everything to the same standard, the same timing, the same operation. Households, industries, and regions can move at their own rhythm.

We call any system that embodies these three principles — autonomous, distributed, and asynchronous — “Off Grid”.

From the nationwide smart meters and measurement systems we’ve deployed, one fact has become clear: many homes and businesses actually run on far less energy than people assume.

• First, optimize the load.
• Generate power where it is used.
• Store the surplus and draw it when needed.

This is the essence of “Point of Load” generation. Instead of building giant infrastructures that carry power across long distances, it is far more rational and sustainable to generate energy right next to where it is needed.

Once, computers were tools reserved for governments and large corporations. The arrival of the personal computer opened up the world of information to individuals.

Today, a similar shift is happening in the world of energy.

Personal Energy® is a “small power utility in a box” that integrates:

• Generation
• Conversion
• Storage
• Distribution
• Control
• Autonomous operation

By taking part of the load off centralized infrastructure, it raises the overall probability that our society can keep operating — even when large systems fail.

We believe civilization should respect values in this order:

1. Life itself.
2. The energy that sustains that life.
3. Money, as a means to support energy and production.

Off-grid technology is our attempt to restore this order through engineering, not rhetoric.

Off-grid is not a movement of resistance against something. It is a quiet choice to reclaim agency.

• To step out of the role of “just a buyer”.
• To generate the energy you truly need.
• To design your own way of living, and your own way of working.

Personal Energy® is a productive asset that makes this choice real. We do not see the people who use it as “customers”, but as partners in co-creation.

We commit to the following:

• To keep developing technologies that strengthen and complement the fragile parts of modern civilization.
• To pursue “energy that does not stop”, regardless of disasters, accidents, wars, or geopolitical shocks.
• To help build the foundations of a decentralized society where every consumer can also be a producer.

For us, “made in KOBE” is more than a label. It is a starting point — a determination to embed the know-how of survival into the next generation of society, as both a way of thinking and a set of technologies.