Community Power is partly financed by the Department of Energy, through its National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. “9-11 is somewhat changing the emphasis of our support to more heavily concentrate on trying to produce substitutes for imported oil, including gasification,” said Richard Bain, group manager of NREL’s biomass thermochemical conversion center. Gasification is a process in which solid fuel is vaporized to a gas.
Biomass, which includes plant matter, agricultural waste and landfill gas, already outpaces geothermal, wind and solar energy generation in the United States. In 2001 (the most recent figures available) it represented 75 percent, or 60 billion kilowatt-hours, of all non-hydro renewable energy generation in the nation, according to NREL.
Most of that generation comes from large-scale utility companies, including Burlington Electric in Vermont, that sell electricity to the grid.
Walt is acting small while thinking big. His team, equipped with $5 million in financing, mostly from the Department of Energy, Shell Renewables, the U.S. Forest Service and the California Energy Commission, has been demonstrating Community Power’s BioMax cookers in a handful of small towns in the United States. Additionally, a 15-kilowatt machine has been electrifying a remote village of 150 homes in the Philippines for three years using wasted coconut shells. Villagers turn the residual fiber into erosion-controlling mats and other products.
Walt aims to start making the machines for commercial use in the United States by late next year, at an estimated cost of $15,000 per unit. If the startup recruits corporate investors and manufacturing partners, Walt expects the price of each unit to drop considerably, making the technology more affordable to homeowners.
“We’re writing a new chapter with small modular biopower,” he said. “The broader part of our initiative is to offset our use of and dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear energy.”
The BioMax system gasifies woody waste instead of incinerating it to make a renewable, gaseous fuel. In turn, this fuel-gas powers an engine or fuel cell to generate electricity and heat, making it an environmentally cleaner alternative to typical fossil fuel-based generators.
So how does Community Power’s BioMax work? In one end you pour a sack of wood chips, nut shells or pellets (considered the optimal fuel because they are small and dense) into an oxygen-starved tank- shaped gasifier, which heats the solid fuel until it forms a combustible gas (up to 800 degrees Celsius, or 1,472 degrees Fahrenheit). The so-called producer gas is a mixture of fuel gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane.
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