APL News Posts

December 2022 2022 has been a year of reemergence for APL. After two years where our markets and customer projects largely stopped due to the pandemic, we’re happy to see your projects starting again, and a similar return to near full activity across APL departments. We’re also simply pleased to…

ALL Power Labs will be running our latest model Power Pallet, a PP30 v2.01 at The Verge Climate Tech Event being held at the San Jose Convention Center from October 25th – 27th. We’ll be set up outside at the Innovation Plaza on San Carlos St. and providing the base-load…

After a long pandemic pause, we’re finally restarting our Open House / Open Shop for all interested to come see the works inside All Power Labs. These are always fun and informative events, with a great gathering of folks, and good food and drink for you too.  So get out of…

This paper in Environmental Science and Technology journal found that biochar-composting reduces CH4 by 79%, compared tocomposting without biochar. ABSTRACT: Livestock are the largest source of anthropogenic methane (CH4) emissions, and in intensive dairy systems, manure management can contribute half of livestock CH4. Recent policies such as California’s short-lived climate…

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded All Power Labs (APL) a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for their renewable energy submission in the amount of $200K to develop Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The SBIR program, also known as “America’s Seed Fund,” grants are distributed annually by the U.S….

All Power Labs & Local Carbon Network Friday, December 13th, 5-7 pmFREE!  But please RSVP here. Chestnuts will likely roast, and walnut shells will certainly thermally convert into Electricity, Heat and Biochar, at this year’s All Power Labs and Local Carbon Network holiday party. In year’s past, we’ve celebrated the end of another year deconstructing fire into its…

40 pre-orders available for the Power Pallet PP30, to enable lower-cost supply chain in 2020. A year ago, All Power Labs released the Power Pallet PP30 Cogen as our completely new generation of the Power Pallet.  This successor to the PP20 incorporates all we’ve learned in the last decade to…

The Modern Discovery of Terra Preta, and a Brief Modern History of Biochar In the Amazon Basin, there exists thousands of hectares of cultivated plots consisting of unusually fertile black soil, termed Terra Preta de Indio — “dark earth of the Indians” — called Terra Preta for short. These soils are many hundreds if…

APL team member Austin Liu at our Biochar & Bioenergy 2019 booth All Power Labs recently attended the Biochar & Bioenergy 2019 conference held in Fort Collins, Colorado from July 1–3. Our CEO, Jim Mason, as well as biochar experts Austin Liu and Aidin Massoumi were on hand, to promote…

Co-composting dairy manure with SkyCarbon biochar In the Local Carbon Network, we convert available green waste into value-added ‘climate products’ such as electricity, heat, water and biochar through a carbon negative process that combats climate change on multiple fronts. The Local Carbon Network uses biomass gasifiers from All Power Labs…

Photo credit: Brooke Porter Photography On Saturday, June 22, the Local Carbon Network joined Burners without Borders, the Permaculture Action Network, and nearly 400 participants for an all-day event at Hoover Elementary School in Oakland, CA, featuring live music, arts, food and hands-on projects to improve the school’s garden and…

On Friday, June 21, All Power Labs and the Local Carbon Network hosted an open house at UC Gill Tract Community Farm, our regenerative farming partner in Albany, CA. More than 60 attendees were given tours of the two-acre organic farm and medicinal herb garden, and were shown the remarkable…

The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) is a great source for information on research and the development of biochar businesses and industry. We will be linking to their newsletters here in our News Blog posts going forward. They recently did testing and certified our Local Carbon Network SkyCarbon biochar, the results…

Friday, March 8th, 5-7pmFREE!  But please RSVP here  Our monthly Open House events continue this Friday with a talk and demonstration of the agronomic and climate benefits of co-composting with biochar.  We’re convinced we’ve stumbled across a highly significant optimization for biochar usage and deployment with this co-composting scenario.  The solution…

We’re honored to announce that All Power Labs is part of the winning team for the Water Abundance XPRIZE 2018. APL was the technical lead for the Skysource/Skywater Alliance team, and brought gasifier based power generation, plus a unique use of water vapor from biomass, to the larger problem of…

Kickstarter Crowdfund in process.  Join us for a 10 day learning holiday on a rural Italian farm,with Power Pallet, biochar, and composting (and all the other Italian provincial pleasures).  This is the Valle Santa / Reiti Valley, where the APL New Farms Labs is located.  We’ve been running machinery at this site for…

We’ve restarted our monthly Open House events at All Power Labs.  Now that we’ve launched the new PP30 Cogen-CS, and the Local Carbon Network is up and running, we have new reasons to gather the interested at our facility in Berkeley CA.  This month we’re having the event this Friday,…

We’re restarting our monthly Open House events at All Power Labs.  Now that we have the new PP30 Cogen-CS launched, and Local Carbon Network up and running, we have new reasons to gather the interested at our facility in Berkeley CA.  This month we’re having the event this week Friday,…

June 29th, 5-7PM, Berkeley California We look forward to seeing many of you at our new product Launch Party later this week.  We have 60 people RSVPed so far, which is approaching the attendenance levels for our full workshop weekends of years ago– which is great.  We also have some surprisingly dedicated international travellers coming for…

Combined Heat and Power with built-in Carbon Sequestration (CHP-CS) All Power Labs invites you to join us for a special Launch Party on Friday, June 29th in Berkeley, CA where we will debut the new Gen 2 Power Pallet.  The event will be a formal presentation by APL Founder/CEO Jim Mason on…

For the last 12 hours of the Local Carbon Network crowdfund campaign, we’re offering a limited set of highly discounted biochar bags; in both single kg servings, as well as 3 month membership delivery form.  The 1kg bags for the next 25 sponsors are reduced from $25 to $15.  And…

  Thank you to all who have participated in the Indiegogo campaign to set the Local Carbon Network project in motion.   So far we’ve raised about $25,000 in Local Carbon sponsorships, which is about 20% of the way to our goal.  This is a great start, and we were pleased so…

Partners Wanted For Waste To Energy Project Trials You likely already know that APL’s technology provides significant value in the areas of waste management and renewable energy, while also making substantial contributions in the fight against climate change. Turning green waste into energy is a win-win-win solution. As pointed out…

Plus: New grants, projects, and the new master plan for reversing climate change. Need power in California? Got green waste? Contact us APL is now expanding into project development in California––operating its own equipment for on-site power and heat generation, focusing initially on sites that can net meter with the…

Flexible clean energy that helps solve climate change? That’s what the LA Times calls biomass gasification from All Power Labs– “one of the most promising technologies” to help solve the forest health crisis in California. Last week the Los Angeles Times, California’s largest newspaper, published an editorial exploring solutions for…

Fall in the United States is known for the colors in New England, as trees turn to the warm shades of autumn before dropping their leaves. That sort of change historically wasn’t common here California, where our forests are mostly evergreen pine trees. At least, that used to be true–but…

Two years in the field and counting — APL technology passes key new product milestone As world leaders gather in New York this week to celebrate Earth Day, and to sign the COP21 Paris Climate Accords,  here at APL we’ve been doing some celebrating of our own. If you have…

APL events all summer long At APL we love talking about how biomass gasification can address the twin challenges of energy access and climate change, while providing a meaningful solution to solid waste problems. So we regularly host events, like this recent tour for local science and technology students. But…

Gasification has been famously described as “all variables, all the time,” and wrangling those variables into a tractable form has been our work at All Power Labs since starting out with the GEK kit back in 2OO8.  Since then, we’ve released five complete generations of our gasification systems, and today…

We got a great climate deal at COP21–now what? We should all be rightly happy about the outcome of the COP21 climate accords.  Now comes the hard and exciting work–how do we reach these climate targets? The answers are sobering, and one take away is absolutely clear: solar and wind…

The first week is finished at COP21, with less than a week to go until the deal is (hopefully) done. APL is attending these climate accord meetings to raise awareness about the potential of biomass gasification + biochar to make carbon negative energy.  Gasification + biochar is a rare solution…

Carbon negative renewable energy : a solution for climate, energy access, and human dignity Or, why we’re going to Paris, and you should be, too (even if just in spirit) Next week, the COP21 finale to two decades of climate talks will be starting in Paris.  The goal is to…

October has been–and continues to be–a big month for All Power Labs. As those who’ve been involved in this for a long while know, one of the biggest challenges in gasification is simply getting people to know it exists. We keep chipping away at this invisibility–as you can see in the…

Renewable energy pioneer Tom Dinwoodie leads investment round and joins APL Board of Directors. We are thrilled to announce that Tom Dinwoodie, a Bay Area legend in renewable energy, has just joined the APL team, becoming the latest addition to our board of directors. Twenty-five years ago and just one…

Liberia power generation report for March, 2015 ​The Biomass Brothers in Kakata, Liberia continue to impress the locals, as well as the APL mothership, with their dedication and technical success in the Booker Washington Institute (BWI) vocational school power house. This facility received the first three Version 5.0 Power Pallets,…

GEK Gasifier, available again after two year hiatus All Power Labs began in 2008 by selling small scale gasifier kits for DIY enthusiasts and university researchers.  Our intent was to provide a “LEGO kit” of gasification to spark new work and new conversation in the relatively uneventful field of biomass…

STREAMING ONLINE ( In Berkeley) APL commissioning and long run test streaming online 16 hours a day, five days a week. Click here for the live feed The big project for APL in 2015 is proving long run time operation, and establishing a formal track record of the Operation &…

All Power Labs is delighted to announce that Dr. Dan Kammen has agreed to join APL, as the founding member of our Board of Directors. We are deeply honored by this engagement, as there are few who can match Dr. Kammen’s breadth of experience and expertise in the area of…

This story on APL was just published in the influential tech blog GigaOM: “..enthusiasm, momentum, and innovative thinking rarely seen in such an organically-emerging startup. And if their gasifiers are ever able to reach any substantial scale, they could have a profound effect on the emergence of off-grid power in…

All Power Labs Wins $2 Million USD Grant for Powertainer Project Very big news–on January 23rd, All Power Labs won a grant for $2M USD from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to complete commercialization and deployment of the Powertainer.  This is a continuation of the work we began several years…

New Upgrades on all PP20 Power Pallets            In 2014, we’ve made more than a dozen upgrades, improvements, and enhancements to the Power Pallet, but haven’t yet shared them with you. Here’s some of the highlights: Ceramic hearth. Last spring we transitioned to a full ceramic hearth for better high…

24 hours of LIVE power online, this week and next Plus – 10% Off Sale for the next two weeks only 24 hours of LIVE power online We’ve made great progress on the performance, reliability and usability of the Power Pallet during 2014. However, we’ve been rather remiss in relaying…

Upcoming Demos: You’re Invited to Join Us at APL Italia HQ in Terni, Italy or in Nairobi, Kenya APL will be hosting two special demonstrations of our products around the world this month. In Terni, Italy, we’ll be offering (limited) availability of our new PP 25 EU to all European…

Today we are pleased to announce a new product: the PC20 Power Cube Over the last year and a half, APL has been collaborating with partners in Italy to develop a fully enclosed, regulation compliant version of the Power Pallet.  The goal with the new machine is to offer a…

We’re hiring, again! APL continues a major round of hiring to fill key management and operational positions in our Berkeley, California headquarters. This is a reflection of our significant growth, new overseas operations, and new products in the pipeline. After filling a few Director positions ( see profiles to right…

Powerful. High Performance. And now: Patented! Many of you have been following our progress for years, as we’ve worked to advance the development of gasification, and that makes us all the more thrilled to share with you some important news related our Power Pallet. Take a look at this photo…

Lighting Liberia -for $.08 a kilowatt hour Development work is notoriously hard, especially in places struggling to recover from civil unrest. That’s why we’re so pleased to tell you about the latest chapter in our work in Liberia, in partnership with Winrock International and USAID. As you may recall, about…

New v5.0 Power Pallet Videos What it is, how it works APL Support Engineer Austin Liu recently wrapped up two videos explaining the features and functions of the v5 Power Pallet.    Part one focuses on the various components:    while part two focuses on the processes: Austin also made…

Come see the v5 Power Pallet-either in person, or online Open House to be livecasted this week APL is having our monthly Open House this week, and wants you to join us. Not in the area? No problem-we’ll also be livecasting the event online. For those nearby, here are the…