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Carbon-Negative Energy Machines Catching On
An anonymous reader writes "All Power Labs in Berkeley, California has produced and sold over 500 machines that take in dense biomass and put out energy. What makes the machines special is that instead of releasing carbon back into the atmosphere, it's concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer. The energy is produced cheaply, too; many of the machines went to poor nations who normally pay much more per kilowatt. '[T]he PowerPallets are still relatively simple, at least as far as their users are concerned. For one, thing Price explained, much of the machine is made with plumbing fixtures that are the same everywhere in the world. That means they're easy to repair. At the same time, while researchers at the 50 or so institutions that have bought the machines are excited by opening up the computer control system and poking around inside, a guy running a corn mill in Uganda with a PowerPallet "will never need to open that door and never will," Price said.'"
Since when has charcoal been something to bury instead of burn? Plants get carbon out of the air, they don't need to absorb it through their roots.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Not ALL the chemical energy of the original fuel, though.
It's a gassifier and engine/gen pair. You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.
Not groundbreaking technology... but proven to work and be a viable means of getting power, especially if you happen to have a lot of biowaste you can throw in there.
Sure, you CAN burn the charcoal leftovers. Might be useful as a cooking fuel, for example. Even if you did that, you're still only carbon neutral. It can also be used to improve soil quality to help grow food or cash crops... which seems like a better use IMHO.
=Smidge=
many energy sources in the developing world can cost 50 or 60 cents per kilowatt, a PowerPallet can do it for a dime
Which does not really add up with costing "less than $2 a watt", unless it should have said "a lot less" in which case $2 is just misleading. I would be interested to know which is true, though. The technology seems both interesting and useful.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
$27,000 is pretty steep. If you could scale something down so you could say, dispose of household greenwaste through it and generate power to feed the grid for a few hours a week, you'd really be on to something. Though this is in a big part because I've always dreamed of having my trash go straight to an incinerator...
Not groundbreaking, but the company claims that their machine is reliable and very easy to field-repair. For a small-scale machine used in developing countries, this is crucial. Farms or small businesses in those countries sometimes receive high tech equipment from well-meaning charities, only to have then break down, at which point they find they lack the skill, parts or money to keep the equipment in good repair.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I found the answer on the producers home page. The "less than $2 a watt" is the initial expense when investing in a plant: A 10 kW plant costs $19,000 and a 20 kW plant costs $29,000, corresponding to $1.9 or $1.45 per watt capacity (source). So, it adds up.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
It's a 10kW system, and looks like it costs $27,000.
$27,000 / 10kW is $2.70 per watt, right? That's not less than $2/watt.
That was probably supposed to be 50 or 60 cents per kWh. 10 cents per kWh is not bad. You can probably even harness the heat from the unit, too.
Indeed. We need to cut down all the forests, replant them, and bury the dehydrated trees in a salt mine or a desert. That is carbon negative.
If you instead of releasing that CO2 are turning the CO2 (directly or indirectly) into C you are removing all of that CO2 from the normal carbon cycle.
Imagine doing this to every plant for 1Million years. At some point all the carbon in the world would be in the form of charcoal, and there would be no CO2 in the atmosphere. Not advised, but thats how.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Imagine using this burn every plant for a lot of years. At some point all the carbon in the world would be in the form of charcoal, and there would be no CO2 in the atmosphere.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
From the article ...
For now, All Power Labs is making only 10 kW and 20 kW versions, though the U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Minnesota recently gave the company a grant to build a 100 kW version.
If this thing is the greatest invention since sliced bread, why does the company (selling $5 million worth of machines per year) need a university grant for product development. Something doesn't pencil out here.
It is carbon negative if you bury the waste charcoal.
It works. During the WWII there were around 700,000 wood gas powered automobiles in Germany, France, Sweden and Finland. As those were back then able to power buses and trucks, it's plausible to think modern designs also producing 20kW of bio power - as advertised.
Finland's eco-mobilist association has a gallery of hobbyist build wood gas mobiles, some even with designs specs and tips. Chairman on the Finland's currently most popular party, which unfortunately isn't The Pirate Party which among others has pirate bay and privacy activist Peter Sunde as a candidate in the coming EU- parliament election, has build his own wood gas automobile - " El Kamina" which by the way is build on top Chevrolet El Camino, which...
______________________
No, I didn't just wrote that
Operational research I did for a ( very ) large Austrian farm showed that carbon intake in the form of humus can be 100-200 kg / hectare / year, in pure carbon. Adding pure carbon ( without going through the humus stage by e.g. first producing compost ) to the soil can help farmers reach that number: bacteria will fix the carbon, plants - around their own roots - will form symbiosis with the bacteria, and when at harvest time the plant or its grain is harvested, the bacteria around the root will die and be turned into humic acid. The whole humus-as-a-carbon-sink thing is, climatically, all the more interesting as the carbon remains fixed in the soil for many 10,000s of years. Humus survives ice ages and periods of global warming.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
No. The process creates charcoal, not ash. When this charcoal is used as a soil amendment, the carbon is fixed for approximately 10 000 years. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Slash and burn will enrich the soil with nitrogen(fertilizer) and pottasium(fertilizer).
The CO2 will go directly into the atmosphere.
If being wrong about electric vehicle pollution makes you an eco-tard, congratulations. You're an eco-tard.
Sierra Club
Popular Science
Or maybe we can all just conduct ourselves with a little more respect. That would be really nice.
Nothing about this machine is vaguely high tech or new. Linked to is a basic how to put together by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA208249
And during WW2, the were used in the US, UK, FR, and DE for were attached to vehicles to provide a fuel source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas_generator#Origins
10kW is essentially the "top speed", and the kWh is the "fuel economy" or more like the miles travelled. You don't have to go at top speed, and if you're going at half speed you're only putting out 5kW, but will still get the same amount of power after 2 hours instead of 1.
The fuel consumption is also important to compute cost. For the 20kW machine, it burns 50 lbs of biomass per hour, which means 50 lbs of biomass is converted to 20kW for an hour, or 50 lbs to get 20kWh. (You can probably burn this over longer times than an hour.)
That's actually a fair amount of power, and 20kWh can power several houses for that one hour. If it's linearly scalable to smaller numbers, that would be very good since a house might only use 20kWh over an entire day. It would allow someone to run solar power during the day, and this thing at night (putting out 1kW) and during rainy days, with only a small battery farm.
But there are too many unknowns in the article to make a good guess.
Humus survives ice ages and periods of global warming
It also makes a delicious dip!
Because if it's worth more a fuel I'm pretty sure what the people running these things will do and it isn't use it fertilizer for the good of the planet.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
"less than $2 a watt" is about as meaningful as "less than 2 square steradians per kelvin-volt" in this context.
You're interested in producing energy. Watts are not a measure of energy, but of rate of change (production or dissipation) of energy.
For example, store all this unit's energy in the mother of all capacitors, and discharge that by shorting it, and you'll get a mind-boggling number of watts. So you would justifiably be able to reword the meaningless press-release statement as "less than a tiny fraction of a cent per watt", and maintain its truth. Which is none, as it's meaningless.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I live in Africa and I can verify that this is a foolish thing to say. We have to open all kinds of doors never meant to be opened and fix thing using materials and tools that in any other place might seem like a joke. But we can, and we do, not because we don't know better but because the things we need to fix were engineered to be used in friendly climates by people who grew up with machines and who value the benefit of the machine more than the selling price of a part, even for scrap. They were constructed economically and without a clever friend they die much much earlier than they were intended to.
By that standard, this device is also photosynthesising.
Just because a tree did it in the past, doesn't mean this device is doing it by using a tree.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
"much of the machine is made with plumbing fixtures that are the same everywhere in the world. "
1/2 " and 1" sizes are hardly 'the same everywhere in the world'
The world is metric.
Please explain.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It makes me a little gassy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And you get the bonus gasifier acid ash that you can use to destroy neighbors soil.
Summary says: "...concentrated into a lump charcoal that makes excellent fertilizer".
I wonder who's right?
No sig today...
"Lump charcoal" is carbon that still has the chemical energy in it.
They're not claiming to extract all the energy.
They're claiming to produce a useful amount of energy from widely available material and be carbon-negative, and help crops grow . Win-win-win.
No sig today...
I thought the same thing. Unless you're pulling carbon out of the air and sequestering it, it's not negative. The amount of carbon burned or lost is probably negligible enough to call it "neutral" but it certainly isn't negative.
FWIW - this is similar to how amateur pyrotechnicians make certain types of charcoal for special firework effects. Most commercial charcoal isn't really speciated, so if you want willow charcoal, you have to make it yourself.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, but as soon as you cut down your source it no longer is converting, so if you are going to use the plant's CO2 in your favor, you must also include the loss of CO2 opportunity capture - all of the CO2 the plant DIDN'T capture if you'd let it run it's normal life course.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
No.
Plus, I've been doing it on Slashdot much longer than on Fark. Neener neener.
=Smidge=
I am a a chemical engineer doing research into bio-fuels (especially in the fields of gasification and pyrolysis). We even have a few of the All Power Labs' Power Pallets.
There are so many factual problems with this article that I do not know where to start.
Perhaps the biggest error is the fact that there is a tremendous amount of carbon released to the atmosphere with this apparatus. Basically, all of the carbon in the biomass that doesn't remain as bio-char is converted to carbon dioxide inside of the generator's motor.
This is what happens when you let CNet report on science and engineering---they blew it.
For example, store all this unit's energy in the mother of all capacitors, and discharge that by shorting it, and you'll get a mind-boggling number of watts.
Yeah, 0W really is a "mind-boggling number". Maybe not as high as you expected, though.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I think you're mistaken as all powerplants are judged by this metric. Dollars per watt is the cost to add x amount of generating capacity to your grid.
Not quite. the innovations are in the control systems. that is what they have patents for. also standard gasification tech tends to convert the biomass to ash. this machine converts it into charcoal which both creates fertilizer and locks a portion of the carbon away mostly creating hydrogen and co. which are combusted into water and co2. the control over the combustion process that allows charcoal production over ash production is imporant as gasifier ash shakedown to make room for more fuel is the biggest problem keeping gasifiers from being used in diy stationary power generation. This tech they have developed dodges this problem.
any 3rd world home using 20kw per day isn't what these are for. My house in the United States with all the electronics (4 computers, 2tv's, Cable Modem, Wireless router and such) uses 44kw per day.
A 3rd world rural home would be lucky to hit 1kw per day unless they've got a regrigerator/freezer. Better to go with a commercial style unit with individual compartments for each family as it means a single unit for the village/government to purchase and power it using Photovoltaics (Solar). The benefit is the availability of lighting in the community kitchen and someone can the be assigned to ensure everything is cleaned. Hell washing pots/pans and scrubbing a kitchen is certainly better then the back breaking work of subsitence farming and it's an area where an older individual can supervise a bunch of children to keep em out of trouble nor does it have to be punishment.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
wood tar can be captured and gasified if the non gasified portion is caoturedb in a filter medium made of fuel and cycled back into the gasifier. part of your fuel then becomes the filter.
This device burns stuff, releases CO2 in the atmosphere that wasn't there before. It'd be carbon negative it if would take out CO2 that was in the atmosphere before. Misleading title, if this was carbon negative, all cars that run on bio diesel are carbon negative as well.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Further down the journalist writes:
many energy sources in the developing world can cost 50 or 60 cents per kilowatt, a PowerPallet can do it for a dime
Which does not really add up with costing "less than $2 a watt", unless it should have said "a lot less" in which case $2 is just misleading. I would be interested to know which is true, though. The technology seems both interesting and useful.
another post cleared up the "less than $2 a watt" as being the initial machine cost
I suspect that the comparison in the developing world of "50 to 60 cents per kilowatt" is a typo, they probably meant "50 to 60 cents per kilowatt-hour" which is the cost of electricity. That the gasifier can do it for 10 cents per kWr is pretty amazing, I pay more than that...but I guess biomass\feedstock for the gasifer is probably super-cheap in the developing world
Actually, the reasons are known. Gas has a poor energy density. This is why you see those huge great balloons on top of WW2 vehicles. Price probably thinks they're to make bombs bounce off.
Compression requires specialized equipment and well made containers, which are expensive. The main active components of the gas are hydrogen (which leaks) and carbon monoxide (which is poisonous).
While it's possible to generate the gas on the fly it's not exactly convenient to warm up the generator in advance and it also makes your car look like that thing out of Wacky Races driven by a bear.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Carbon neutral and non-neutral relate to releasing carbon that is trapped (i.e. oil, coal) and doesnt participate in the "short-term" carbon cycle. You can plant and burn trees for eternity and the amount of carbon going into and from the air will be (almost) neutral. If you turn trees into coal, but can grow more trees, you will slowly deplete carbon from the atmosphere, and have it in your trunk.
If instead you take all the oil and coal and burn them you will be adding a lot of otherwise non-gaseous/non-carbon-cycle carbon into the carbon-cycle
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
If instead when they die (at your hand or otherwise) you convert them to a block of Carbon then that CO2 is removed from the cycle.
Its true, not all carbon in the carbon cycle is in the atmosphere. A lot is trapped in plants and animals, but these are "short-term" not geological scale storage. Carbon neutral/positive/negative is talking about whether the cycle gains or loses carbon.
If you burned the coal that you made with this machine until it was all back to CO2, THEN it would be carbon neutral.
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
You heat the fuel in an oxygen-poor environment (the heat comes from burning a part of the fuel itself using what little oxygen is present) which releases volatile compounds and produces carbon monoxide. This syngas is then fed into an internal combustion engine where it's burned to completion to produce power.
So, not carbon-neutral, just carbon-reduced. And definitely not carbon-negative. Carbon-reduced can still be useful, of course.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
> Simplifying one of your statements:"You're interested in producing energy. Watts are a measure of production of energy."
That's not simplifying, that's removing any reference to a rate of change. And thus completely changing the meaning.
And if you think your solar cell is a power *source*, you are so freaking off base, there's no point in attempting meaningful scientific dialogue with you, you have no respect for terminology at all.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
If the writer of the article doesn't even know that, what else if he ignorant of? (Any potassium, phorphorus, and trace elements will act directly as fertilizer.) Furthermore, as soil conditioners go, you'd be much better off including it in a compost and then spreading the compost. Straight charcoal will make soil alkaline and plenty of crops wouldn't like that.
So this process is definitely not producing loads of free fertilizer. Energy? Sure. Gasification has been around for decades. And it sounds more carbon neutral than trying to convert bio-waste into methanol or ethanol. Plus the small fact that we're pretty bad at using waste to make ethanol. This sounds like a much more practical process to enable the use of agricultural wastes for fuel.
But spare us the ill-informed blather about fertilizer.
Once again, the journalist messes up his units. He obviously meant to say kWh, kilowatt-hours, a unit of energy, instead of just kilowatt, a unit of power.
Any judgement that does not take into account how long the powerplant will run will one time dimension different from a measurement in watts (be they We or Wt, that's the same dimension, just a different scale factor). And any mention of one-time overheads (cost of production, decommissioning, etc.) of the facility only makes sense if you are taking into account how long the powerplant will run.
And one-time overheads *were* mentioned, therefore the more useful metric is the joule-based one, rather than the watt-based one.
I refer back to the example of incredibly high capacity that self-destructs almost immediately. Why does nobody use such mechanisms to add low dollar-per-watt capacity to their grid?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
... but the problem is the same one that faces the guy that converts his car to run on the waste cooking oil of restaurants. What happens when the very-limited supply runs out because 'everybody' is doing it or because the source decides that this is an income stream and charges for the oil? It's a great idea until it isn't.
They're right, biomass is everywhere until 'everyone' needs it and then there won't be enough. Will this lead to pervasive stripping of the land of all biomass like what the Haitians did to the forests on their island looking for firewood? This biomass has to be brought to the machine. Imagine an ever-widening circle of bare land around the machine.
How are the people supposed to transport the biomass to the machine? At what point will the energy used to transport the biomass to the machine render the output carbon-positive? Gas engines need gas, draft animals need to be fed and suddenly the 'positive carbon negative' becomes the 'negative carbon positive'.
What happens if these poor regions start to develop an energy intensive infrastructure? There are cell phones everywhere. This implies all of the support structures -- towers, central processing areas, distribution etc -- will need power, not just for the phone chargers. Throw in lights in their huts, some modern electical conveniences (and the profit whores are lining up to exploit these areas), not to mention Zuckerberg's effort to 'altruistically' expand the internet to 5 billion additional people and you're looking at a nightmare as these poor, ignorant souls succumb to the predations of the profiteers.
If we, the modern, sophisticated people of this planet, can be seduced en masse to eat up Facebook and its lifeblood the advertising (with all of the consumption that that implies), what chance do these technically and psychologically unsophisticated people have against the onslaught of consumerism?
The problem, as I see it, is the 'white man's' religion. I mean not only the Krister religion that tells them their indigenous religions and practices that have supported them for eons is crap and now you need the new, impoved Jeebuz, but the 'evangelism' of consumerism where these hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming peoples just can't make it in this brave, new world without modernity's 'blessings'.
What happens when an ancient culture that tilled the soil with wooden plows and an ox are given a tractor? Now they need fuel and all of the infrastructure to supply it. They need parts and a means of repair. They need a transportation pipeline to the manufacturer. They'll need modern fertilizers and the pesticides as their success demands more success and the bounty starts to attract the crop-eating insects and pests. The huge demands on the the water supply in semi-arid regions will cause untold changes and damage to their lives. The support infrastructure for that one tractor is huge and destructive of a functioning, albeit ancient, society that was in balance with its environment.
What they get in return, if they do things right, is a crop so huge that they have an advantage over their neighbors that demands a response from the neighbors in the form of either more tractors and infrastructure to keep up or local conflicts arise because of the economic distortion. Now the original tractor necessitates the need for arms to protect their advantage. And it quickly goes downhill from there.
And when these dirt-poor people suddenly have a windfall of artificially created wealth what becomes of their culture that was in perfect harmony with their environment? What becomes of the inevitable pollution by a people so unsophisticated that they unknowing kill or cripple themselves and their kids? Do you think the profiteers care one whit?
Look at Nigeria and all of its oil wealth. The place is a shithole of extremely nasty pollution and environmental degradation they could not imagine when the first 'capitalist evangelical' pitched them 'an offer they couldn't refuse'. And we don't even need to address
Whether it's a win or a lose depends on how much energy you need, now much fuel you have lying around and how much the "fertilizer" is worth to you.
A third-world farmer might see a win where a first world energy junkie doesn't.
No sig today...
mmmm fire up the grill!
There have been lots of these gasification setups in the past. Two problems are always:
1) Aside from a colocation with an agriculture / waste facility, you will have to scour a large radius to get the amount of biomass to burn reliably. There is significant transport cost to that.
2) For low grade biomass that you're talking about, you're incurring additional fuel and $ to gasify the biomass, to then burn it. This doesn't really make sense. If you're just generating power, you would probably just burn the biomass material itself. Maybe a stirling engine.
Very few applications using gasification have gone anywhere.
The watt is a unit of power, so it doesn't make much sense to speak of kilowatts per day. Did you mean kilowatt-hours?
You seem to be hung up on the precise scientific terminology. But the metric used ($/watt hour) is not a scientific metric and doesn't pretend to be. It is a valid way of evaluating and comparing the relative financial viability of various technologies.
Being able to compare the startup and operating costs to produce a watt is useful. After all, isn't that's how consumers are charged for electricity?
Is it scientifically accurate? Probably not. Is it useful in the context it's being used? I think so.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
Did you read the article? The creator says basically the same thing that you just did. They aren't claiming to have invented new technology, they are resurrecting old technology and turning it into an easy to use product.
It's not exactly fertilizer, though I'd consider that an acceptable shorthand for a popular piece. Adding charcoal to soil can both improve nutrient availability and long term soil structure. (I'm including two link,s biochar being the general concept, and terra preta being a particularly interesting historical example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta
There is global warming and it hasn't even stopped for the past 15 years.
That quote cannot be explained because it's dead wrong.
Google on "biochar". That is what All Power Labs is producing. It is a soil amendment with remarkable properties.
Will
The crop cycles into which this technology is introduced will have to be examined carefully to evaluate its impact. Is it better to burn or gassify the non-food parts of plants? Or till them back into the soil where microbes can act upon them in symbiosis with the next generation of crops. In the final analysis, we have to figure out how much energy is being diverted from biological (crop) cycles to power a more energy intensive lifestyle.
Have gnu, will travel.
The points that aren't being stressed here is that the biochar sequesters a significant amount of carbon in the soil for the long term, and can significantly improves soil structure and nutrient availability. (It's not a fertilizer, though for a popular article I guess that might be a fine hair to split.) The terms to look up are biochar and terra preta.
I would still prefer to see their numbers, as whether they're "carbon" negative is almost certainly a matter of definition. My guess would be that they're sequestering more carbon than they're releasing into the atmosphere... which is at least arguable. Though only if they've made arrangments to dispose of their biochar in an appropriate way.
Batch biochar production has been steadily increasing for a decade, so that is not new.
But All Power Labs has developed a continuous flow process, and that is breaking new ground. These rigs could be quite useful in reducing the expense of waste management.
Will
And this is why it's important to understand that while biochar improves soil fertility, it is not fertilizer, and is a viable long term form of carbon sequestration.
The cost of eletricity generators are usualy measured over their peak power. $2/W is exactly the number you need to know for determining how much power you can buy, and exactly the number you need to compare with alternatives (for example, $2/W makes it a quite expensive power source to aquire - near double the price of photovoltaics).
Rethinking email
So, not carbon-neutral, just carbon-reduced. And definitely not carbon-negative. Carbon-reduced can still be useful, of course.
Are you sure you know what those terms mean?
Burning biomass and having carbon left over means it's carbon negative. The carbon emitted as CO2 minus the carbon absorbed from growing the biomass is a negative number.
=Smidge=
Yeah, no. The point is that you run it on biomass, so the whole cycle is carbon-neutral or carbon-negative:
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal
Stop there, and you've got some energy out, and if you bury the charcoal, it's carbon-negative. Or use the charcoal as fuel, e.g. for cooking/heating (hopefully replacing fossil fuel currently used in those roles), and you get
CO2 + H2O --photosynthesis-> biomass --power-pallet-> CO2 + H2O + charcoal --charcoal-burning-> CO2 + H2O
Which is carbon neutral, bringing us right back where we started.
The only way you can call it "only carbon-reduced" is if you don't look at the whole cycle, or if you're actually feeding it fossil hydrocarbons instead of biomass, and not burning the coal that comes out -- and it's not clear that that would make any economic sense.
Cool Planet is doing something very similar. They add an additional step wherein the carbon is treated to have a biofilm before using it as a soil amendment.
Did you even bother reading the comment I replied to? JaredOfEuropa was claiming that this is high tech and hard to implement.
The 10 kW system is $19,000 ($1.90/W), 20 kW system is $27,000 ($1.35/W).
I'm not sure why it costs anything to make electricity from this. It uses free agricultural waste (shells, chips, etc.) The electricity is produces should be free.
You may have to pay someone to run the machine and of course there is the cost of capital (figure 10%/year).
If you run a 20 kW unit full time for a month (24x30=720x20 kW=14,400 kWH). Perhaps they calculate this as the cost...14,400 kWH @ $0.10 is $1,440 which should cover costs of running the machine and the capital costs. YMMV
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
The cost of power plants are always quoted as $/W of installed capacity. Nuclear works out to be about $10/W, solar $3/W, etc.
The 10 kW system is $19,000 ($1.90/W), 20 kW system is $27,000 ($1.35/W). This is a low cost power plant.
Also, considering that the fuel should be free or very low cost since it is agricultural waste, the power produced should also be very low cost.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Solar panels are now less than $1/W but by the time you add in racks, inverters, installation labor, permits, etc. the cost is more like $3/W.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
TFA does point out that gasification is not "new" (used widely in WWII). This company has added an Arduino to monitor and control the machine so that is "high tech".
What is groundbreaking (so to speak) is that they are making a machine that you can just buy and run with minimal training (and is easy to repair).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Here's the innovative high tech part:
"These smarts are further extended by a multi-stage gasification architecture, and an innovative “waste heat” capture and recycling system — what we call the Tower of Total Thermal Integration (Hot TOTTI). In traditional systems, hot engine exhaust and hot output wood gas have been “problems” requiring extra space and cooling components to counter. With the GEK Hot TOTTI, we’ve transformed these “wastes” into useful new inputs to the gasification process. It’s like adding a new “free” heat source to fix the old and well known thermal challenges of a gasifier."
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Time has nothing to do with grid capacity.
You can't call up your customers and tell them to turn half their lights off but let them turn them on for twice a long because you're provisioning your power output in W/h instead of watts.
Generation must be able to copy with peak demand.
Actually I've noticed community colleges where the teachers wrote at about that level. Education isn't what it once was.
My comment was in regards to that made by JaredOfEuropa.
These machines have always been easy to make, repair, and run.
Recent commercial manufacture in the US is the only interesting new point.
"It is a valid way of evaluating and comparing the relative financial viability of various technologies."
I.e. it's the correct thing to use in the context of this article. Which is why I used it. This idea of scientific units being multiplied together magically becoming unscientific intrigues me - please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
If you are ignoring how long they will last, then you are not evaluating any useful cost.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
http://wiki.gekgasifier.com/w/page/6123834/Tower%20of%20Total%20Thermal%20Integration
You mean that? This is still not a high tech device nor from a design standpoint is this even ground breaking, maybe the first time it has been applied to this exact problem, but recovering heat like this is a fairly standard method if one has something they can apply it to.
Whoosh....
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This charcoal-as-fertilizer part of the cycle seems a bit of a waste. Sure you go from carbon-negative to carbon-neutral, but isn't ash (nearly) as good a fertilizer as charcoal? It seems to me a stockpile of standby fuel could be an important safety net in areas where the biomass is seasonal.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
The fuel will be free right up to the point there's a demand then it will go up. Turkey guts, fry oil, etc are no longer cheap or free. Hell I can't even get scrap or chipped wood like I used to from a landscaping company at the low price I was paying. They're selling all their scrap to a company making wood pellets for stoves.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Labor and maintenance.
You forgot the carbon released by the burning of the methane gas, and the released carbon monoxide.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
50lbs an hour! That's a lot of stuff. Where do peasants in the desert a hold of so much stuff to use as fuel?
They they should fucking say kWh, and not kW.
Apparently the porous charcoal helps promote bacterial growth in the soil, improving overall soil health rather than simply fertilizing it.
Nothing is preventing the production of an ever thickening layer of charcoal in which to store excess carbon. It just means it's an ongoing solution.
Well if you want to get literal, all combustion is a carbon neutral process. Petroleum was originally biomass hundreds of millions of years ago. This is merely carbon negative on a relative short time scale (months to decades, depending on source of the fuel).
Yes. Between batches the filters need cleaning, for one thing. Still, it's one nifty bit of kit, and these guys look to have done a fine job of it.
For feeding several homes or a small wood or machine shop, you'd want to have several machines, to run in relays to cover each other's downtime. Depending on where one lived, extra juice could be sold back to the grid. A few of these and a Bloom box or the like and one could be the neighborhood power company, if the local law didn't forbid it. For third-world neighborhoods, wherever found, and for supplemental power during natural and other disasters, this stuff would be golden.
I note in the article that many of the machines have been sold to places in the Tropics. If there has not been complete de-forestation, and if there are crops with a lot of waste - cane and sorghum come to mind, I'm having a brain-fart on recalling others - then these would fit right in. Plus, given the generally thin and often poor quality of native post-jungle soils, what hasn't been washed away could benefit nicely from the charcoal. (Conserving, building, and re-building soil is a big problem all over, including the U.S.)
I've noticed the same thing here in the Midwest, where wood and bark chips could be had for the asking, now not so much; you either know somebody or you buy it.
This idea of scientific units being multiplied together magically becoming unscientific intrigues me - please subscribe me to your newsletter.
Now I understand your problem. Your think the numbers were being multiplied which I agree would be stupid. I thought you knew that "/" means division or in this case "per" as in "how many dollars will it cost me per watt hour produced".
Trolls and people under 5 years of age might not know this.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
A house with a 120V / 100 A feed can be accommodate with a 12000 W generator.
Close to true. With AC systems you have the additional worry of power factor, since the phase of the voltage and current do not have to be the same. For perfectly resistive loads, your simplification is true. For inductive loads (motors) and capacitive loads, the apparent power is very different from the 'actual' or 'consumed' power. You statement would be closer to true as "A house with a 120V / 100 A feed can be accommodate with a 12000 VA generator. " The difference between Watts and Volt*Amps is the power factor.
With a perfectly inductive load, I could require the generator to supply 100 VA, but actually consume 0 actual Watts!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Why? Is this machine going to last for more than the 30 years that most solar pannels last?
Rethinking email
Are you a mathematical numbnut or something? Multiplication and division are associate operations. Every multiplication (by a non-zero value) is a division (by the reciprocal), and every division (by a non-zero value) is a multiplication (by the reciprocal).
And because of this, to a scientist, units, which is what was being talked about, are dimensioned in multiples of powers of fundamental units. E.g. the units for acceleration = m.s^-2
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
No, they didn't. The released gasses are part of the process - they are burned alongside the hydrogen that's powering the generator.
Basically in exhaustive detail the reaction is:
CO2 + H20 +energy (photosynthesis) ----> Biomass
Biomass --(oxygen-deprived heating)--> biochar + H2 (+ CO, CH4 and other trace gasses)
H2 + other gasses --(combustion)--> CO2 + H20 + heat
The released CO2 and H20 is then free to be reabsorbed by more plants, but most of the carbon ends up as biochar rather than CO2 as it would if you simply burnt the wood rather than gassifying it.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
> whether they're "carbon" negative is almost certainly a matter of definition
How do you figure? If they were simply burning biomass directly as fuel, releasing all the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2, then they would still be carbon-neutral, agreed? Since they are producing biochar, that is carbon that's not being released back into the atmospheric carbon cycle, hence they become carbon-negative, regardless of how much they produce. If they then burnt the biochar, sold it as cooking fuel, etc. then they would be only carbon-neutral again, but so long as the biochar is used for soil enrichment rather than as fuel they remain firmly negative. And that's not exactly rocket science, you just have to dig it into the soil. Our ancestors have been doing it for at least thousands of years.
Hell, even if they sell the charcoal as fuel the process is still potentially carbon-negative if that charcoal is displacing fossil fuels. More likely though it would be displacing burning wood or dried dung, which would still be of great environmental and social benefit as charcoal tends to burn hotter and cleaner than alternatives, with fewer health concerns - smoke inhalation related illnesses are one of the leading health problems in the developing world.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The engine is not running primarily on carbon-based fuel. The biomass is heated in a low oxygen environment to produce hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide (aka wood gas). the generator then burns those gasses with the exhaust being a mixture of water vapor and CO2. Yes, the carbon monoxide thus burned does re-enter the carbon cycle, but most of the carbon gets left behind as biochar rather than being released as carbon monoxide to be burnt (depending on the design of the gasification chamber).
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Well, a little longer timescale than that - biochar will remain in the soil not for months or decades, but around 10,000 years. Still not all that dramatic on geological timescales, but practically forever from the perspective of ecosystem cycles.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The first-world mentality is unsustainable - it is based upon exponential growth and thus MUST change into something sustainable or collapse, and it's looking increasingly likely that this will be the century when it happens. Meanwhile projects like this will help the developing world to actually gain many of the truly dramatic advantages of the first-world, without incurring the unsustainable environmental costs. Our way of life in the first world is probably doomed, eventually we will be forced to dramatically reduce our ecological footprint, better for everyone if the technology to do so has already seen extensive development and deployment among those who are currently climbing to the places we will descend to.
And frankly technology like this is *exactly* the sort of thing we should be cheering for - based on simple technology and standardized components readily available around the world. This is the sort of thing that a African village could build for itself if it only knew how: once they buy one they can maintain it themselves, and assuming there's a couple clever people around they can build more themselves. Everybody wins. The first-worlders are making some profit while developing and refining sustainable technology, and the third-worlders are getting a sustainable power plant that's cheaper to own and operate than most of the alternatives, and doesn't leave them dependent on ongoing assistance from the first world. Which is a major problem with most imported technology - where is a third world village going to get reliable power for, say, a first-world anesthesia machine, much less the parts and knowledge required to maintain it? Or charge controllers and batteries for a solar power station? Or..., or...,or...?
So yeah, I'll tip my hat to these folks - this is a cobblestone on the path to an equitable future.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I was referring to the time it took for the fuel source to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere.
They can be pretty resourceful. I've seen guys change car struts with a bumper jack, and a sturdy belt as a spring compressor.
The plants that you burn in the machine pulled the carbon out of the air for you while they growed. Therefore the process is carbon-negative.
Or the shift key, apparently.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thanks Gary... so it is actually sequestering the carbon even when used as a fertilizer.
The OP was based on plants pulling carbon out of the ground in addition to the air, but it's obviously a much lower rate that doesn't creep for centuries.