APL wins $2M grant, and patent, for PowerTainer
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 ago with the University of Minnesota and Cummins Power Engineering, to build a 100kW gasifier, engine, and hopper feed system fully enclosed within a 20′ shipping container. Information and pictures of that project are here. The new funding will enable new design and reliability testing cycles to take the Powertainer……
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 compact and highly automated biomass power and heat solution, requiring minimized install space or onsite construction, and to deploy it at half the price point of comparable systems on the market in Europe. This new Combined Heat and Power (CHP) gasifier system lowers the cost from the current 4€/watt and above, to around 2€/watt. This makes the system broadly relevant and accessible across……
Powerful. High Performance. And now: Patented!
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 of our CEO JIm Mason: He’s holding US Patent 8764857 B2, issued earlier this summer. The US Patent Office, after an exhaustive review, issued this patent for our core design and operational relationships. This affirms that APL’s innovative design and component interaction truly is groundbreaking, which is remarkable if you……
Lighting Liberia on Biomass-grand opening
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 a year ago we started a project at the Booker Washington Institute in Kakata, Liberia, to turn eager students into renewable energy experts while providing cheap energy from waste biomass, on a campus thoroughly looted during the civil war. Fast forward to last month, and the barren room in……
Fast Company’s Article on APL
-FastCompany Magazine, discussing APL’s Power Pallet: “The most important and transformative energy product no one has heard of” That’s the headline from a news article about APL that just landed on newstands around the world. APL has been busy for the last five years, so busy we haven’t been talking to the media much. Well, now it seems they’re coming to us. Fast Company magazine, which chronicles the technology and culture of Silicon Valley and the new digital economy, just published a large story about APL–all about our work, how we got started, and where we’re going: From the story: “an……
Announcing the New v.5 GEK Gasifier & Power Pallet
Now with up to 24hr run time, increased reliability and ease of use Today we’re pleased to announce the new v5.0 GEK Gasifier and related Power Pallet. Two years in development, the v5.0 represents a generational change in our core gasifier technology, incorporating all we’ve learned over the last five years of development and deployment. For you, this means a significant advancement in performance, ease of use, and cost of operation/maintenance. All Power Pallets purchased from today forward will incorporate this new generation v5.0 gasifier and related auxiliary components. The original modular GEK architecture has been an extremely powerful……
Corncobs into power: a Uganda case study + new ROI calculator
Making energy From “waste”– a case study in corn from Uganda As part of Richard Scott’s recent African field trip, he stopped in to help Pamoja Cleantech set up their new Power Pallets in Kampala, Uganda. This project–as well as the previous one discussed in Liberia, and the one we’ll report on soon from Malawi– are all proof of concept projects for a larger roll out of rural electrification in Africa using biomass gasification. Pamoja Cleantech’s gasifiers (Pamoja means “together as one” in Swahili) are running on corn cobs, with the energy being used to power a corn flour mill……
Grid-tie for the 20kW Power Pallet
We’ve long wanted to provide a reasonably priced grid-tie solution for the Power Pallet. However sync equipment for small scale systems is scarce, and usually at price points near equal the Power Pallet itself. Today we’re announcing the availability of a fully complete, non-hacked, and equipment certified grid-tie solution for the 20kw Power Pallet for $4,995. This is a solution that will work for nearly all global grid standards, as well as enable off-grid parallel feeding with large gensets already at your facility. We think this tie solution is a game changer for the broad usability of the Power Pallet.……
APL in the Field: Powertainer install at UNM Morris
Bear Kaufmann, Jeff Tiedeken and Jim Mason are at University of Minnesota, Morris this week installing the Powertainer and setting it up for its initial runs onsite. This has been a long haul, and we’re very happy to finally have it here and soon begin pumping biomass power back into the grid. A big thank you goes to Lowell Rasmussen, Jim Barbour and Dave Aronson at the UMM for making this project possible, as well as their general dedication to proving small scale biomass energy for midwestern ag applications. As well a huge thank you to APL team member Nick Monahan……
APL in the Field: Indonesia Report
Yoav and I just returned from a trip to Indonesia to help with the set up and operational instruction for 2 Power Pallets there. They are being integrated into a pilot stage “Village Hub” project. This pilot is located next to a palm sugar factory run by the Masarang Foundation (http://www.masarang.nl/). The factory uses waste geothermal heat from a 35 MW geothermal plant to dry and prepare palm sugar. This sugar is prepared from the sap of the Arenga Palm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arenga_pinnata), a species studied by Willie Smits who studied forestry in the Netherlands (and gave a great TED talk. The……