RE: Here's a Taste of the Flavor of Epiphany: Just the Tip of the Spear
The very existence of FOSS is a demonstration that this is happening. Tech is not a possession. It's knowledge.
While there are folks around that could accelerate this transition, I've not found depending on others a successful business plan, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for anyone to make this happen.
I want to do it before I die, and I'm certainly closer to death than birth.
I'm not an engineer, physicist, or any such thing. I'm a carpenter and have done some other things, but I think in science. Not scientific knowledge, but the scientific method. Bias is an issue LOL.
LENR is highly intriguing, although I see cold fusion as a form of LENR, and suspect that there was more success than ended up publicly known in that tale. The formation and collapse of bubbles does create phenomenal local energies, and I am quite intrigued by the possibilities, mostly in other realms than fusing atoms, however.
We can always go back to plodding oxen to drive stuff.
Power to the people!
I own a music business and do almost no hard-core engineering for the past 15 years...there are extenuating reasons.
LENR is a generic term, cold fusion (not very cold, for the most part, but certainly attainable terrestrially) a subset. Sonofusion is an excellent example on one of the more restricted forms of cold fusion, but lightning has been with us always and should have been tripping alarms in physicists' minds all along, given that it stimulates gamma, cosmic ray, and neutron emission...
Water arcs are another rich field of study with highly-suggestive data generated for over 100 years.
The problem is, any reasonable implementation outside of one-off projects suitable for mass deployment that could literally solve the major constraint of yours (centralization of power resources) will require a rather large corporation for manufacture, distribution, and marketing of genuinely safe devices. This could be quickly open-sourced (a lot of it is right now, check out @mfmp ) and it will inevitably kill a lot of people (we men too often have serious difficulty following directions, and with ... control...)
I'm a fierce supporter of open-source, but sadly aware of our willful stupidity.
P.S. we use oxen power in my community. It's terribly slow and demanding if you're trying to raise more food than for a large family. Few families will make the necessary sacrifices to actually eschew power equipment.
Nor should we eschew more practical means of generating power--as long as we don't have to.
Oxen, as you point out, aren't particularly efficient engines. I've been wracking my brain for decades to devise a means of making chickens haul their own tractors. Not easy.
Stationary bikes are probably more efficient than oxen, but there's plenty of better ways to make power, and if Megacorp won't play nice, then bye bye Megacorp!
Power is available in so many different forms that it's really not possible to prevent folks from generating it.
Just ran into a tidbit about management software for composite printing (this is both control software and higher-level apps) with organic and inorganic fibers, presumably some tweaking for metal (nano-wire, whisker, and cermet fiber) is possible.
http://3d.markforged.com/try-eiger.html
It's not locked to the company's multi-material printers.