We got a great climate deal at COP21 – Now What?
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 alone won’t do it. We’ll need carbon negative energy, and on a massive scale. APL brought a big team to COP21 to share a simple message: affordable, renewable, carbon negative energy from biomass is here, and ready to help solve the twin challenges of energy access and climate change.……
Report from COP21
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 that can offset and replace fossil fuel emissions for contemporary power generation, as well as capture and and sequester additional carbon against previous fossil emissions. It is both fossil offsetting generation and atmospheric carbon drawdown together. The result is quite a few “a ha’s” at our booth with consequential folk,……
APL is going to Paris for COP21 and carbon negative energy
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) […]
From Workshop, to White House, to Silicon Valley
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 events below–and plan more chipping around the upcoming COP21 climate meetings in Paris in December. More on our plans to shout “gasification + biochar = carbon negative energy” in a very crowded room in Paris coming up shortly. In the interim, here’s what October looked like around APL. First: OEM Workshop First came our GEK Gasifier OEM workshop ten days ago.These gatherings……
Tom Dinwoodie invests in, joins APL Board
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 block from the APL headquarters in Berkeley, CA, Tom Dinwoodie founded PowerLight Corporation. He grew PowerLight from a start up to a $250+ million dollar powerhouse that later merged with solar giant SunPower, where he went on to serve as the CTO of SunPower Systems Business. “All Power Labs has……
Return of the GEK
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 thermal conversion. Over the following years we were amazed at the interest these kits generated globally, and the acceleration of collaborative research and knowledge exchange that followed. Here’s what the GEK v1 looked like in 2008: We ultimately sold over 300 of these kits before they were eclipsed by our……
Dr. Dan Kammen, Global Energy Access Expert, Joins APL
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 access to renewable energy. As Founding Director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Kammen has been a world leader in research to improve energy access, and has traveled widely to see first hand the challenges and opportunities of delivering affordable, reliable, clean……
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……