Berkeley startup and its energy machines are about to take off

The chemistry is interesting, you're making bbq charcoal out of (yard) waste. You can also make town gas with some water and the waste (steam reformed carbon monoxide).

The characterization of temperamental is an understatement, but given experience and a pile of tireless microcontrollers they're going to have better luck.

WRT biochar if you go for town gas production you have no biochar output anymore. Also there is little difference between biochar and cooking charcoal so depending on local conditions it gets burned as fuel. Still carbon neutral.

You can get quite a bit of process heat off a gassifier.

The engineering tends to scale pretty well with size, so if you have functioning transport and economy you tend toward the American model of a very large charcoal production plant. Its interesting seeing the tech applied elsewhere. The forest idea is pretty cool, you could run a local sawmill off scrap and cutoffs and ship down the lighter boards instead of entire trees.

That's a nice little unit. It seems to have enough control automation that it can run by itself most of the time, so it doesn't a full-time attention. Startup and shutdown take a lot of manual attention, but that's tolerable. It also produces enough power (10-20KW) to run a small farm and/or a shop.

It's a good thing that this outfit sells a real product to real customers, and isn't running on grants from governments and NGOs. They have to make a unit that's cost-effective.

With a little more automation, it can probably be sold to US farms. US farms tend to have few people around, so it has to be rated for unattended operation.

We figured out how to not emit any (well, trace amounts of) carbon monoxide for our gasifier, if you want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JogvxmGYZOk

You can check out http://www.sitessrl.com/ it's a fairly mature technology for them, they can probably help out.

Also, check out All Power Labs in Oakland.

This is very similar, if not the same, technology as Husk Power Systems. HPS had a lot of press around 5 years ago for going to villages in India which grew corn and burning their husk for power using tech from WWII. They were so successful that corn husk became a commodity in the villages they entered. A part of their model was also to train locals to become engineers and manage the machines themselves. Pretty incredible value add at many different levels.

http://www.huskpowersystems.com

When I moved to the west coast one of the first things I did was go to an AllPowerLabs open house! They have these very regularly... if you're interested in this sort of thing you should drop in.

Oldie, but a goodie. The gasifier powered honda --> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JyazgRBtq8

I'll never forget the day over a decade ago, when working with the founder Jim at the Long Now Foundation, that he came into the office with most of the hair burned off his face, apparently in some sort of unexpected combustion incident.

Couldn't be happier for him that his fire experiments have turned into this. Best of luck!

I visited this place with Brewster Kahle in 2012. It is interesting that they can manufacture these things in the Bay Area.