John Robb brings news about the GEK gasifier, an exciting open source project where you create electricity for your house using wood and other biomass waste.
I’m planning to talk with the people behind All Power Labs this Wednesday on the Resilient Strategies Roundtable. They’ve done some excellent open source work on wood gasification for electricity and biochar production.
They’re even shipping a product called the power pallet (seen below) that significantly simplifies wood gasification technology at the personal level. These pallets ship in either the 10 kW or 20 kW versions, at a cost of <$2 a watt.
Our motivating goal is to deploy at scale a new type of energy product– a personal scale waste-to-energy appliance. Imagine a “PC of energy”, or a “washing machine of power”; a machine which intakes the waste biomass all around us, and converts it to multiple forms of power and products, right where they’re needed. Instead of hauling the biomass to a central utility for conversion, we’re bringing the machine to where the fuel already is, right where the users and needs already are.
This technology – or something similar – has been operational in south Asia for about a decade in the form of home-scale Dendro power plants. It’s good to see someone developing it here.
They plan even more than electricity generation!
“The Power Pallet is a complete biomass power generation solution that converts woody biomass into electricity, and soon to heat or PTO shaft power.”
Not much need for heat in South Asia… but they do use the residual ash for fertilizer.