Gasification unit on playa. waste wood = charge Batteries

coolingman · Post by **coolingman** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:05 pm

Hello fellow burners, Ducky here, six year burner. Heres a great way to green the burn, or balance BRC's carbon footprint. A company in Berkley builds and sells a unit that fits on a pallet that has a small gasifier on it that produces clean burning wood gas to run a generator. We would need to an (electric) chipper to process the wood waste, but we can charge peoples batteries and run some refrigeration equipment, maybe for center camp. With the huge amounts of wood waste normally burned at the event, we are looking for burners who might want to invest with us. If you are interested check out All Power Labs, allpowerlabs.org and get in touch with me. They make equipment that could cleanly convert all of the garbage produced at the festival into electricity which would reduce the fossil fuel demands greatly. Also we wouldn't be contributing to landfill pollution. This will take some serious investment, but for now, these power pallets could help green the burn and charge folks up who are camping with a deep cycle battery. Get in touch, looking forward to meeting new faces again this year [email protected]

mudpuppy000 · Post by **mudpuppy000** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 1:41 pm

The wood gas thing would be cool. I'm not sure how much waste wood is available till people start to pack up though.

Isotopia · Post by **Isotopia** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 4:58 pm

We would need to an (electric) chipper to process the wood waste, but we can charge peoples batteries and run some refrigeration equipment, maybe for center camp.

Um, I'd like to see the numbers you crunched to determine how the fuel subsidy to generate the electric chipper's output is offset by charging batteries.

Short of a perpetual motion machine or holding hands and chanting around a crystal alter I don't see how this works with any efficiency.

Also, when you speak of investment to a crowd of people it's generally not a bad idea to give a ballpark estimate of just what this investment entails. What are we talking about here and are we talking about investing in something that you have a direct connection to or part in?

Major Krash · Post by **Major Krash** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 3:21 pm

I have attended one of APL's seminars, these things really do work and Jim and his crew have done some fantastic work automating the whole process (as well as contributing significantly to the body of research world-wide).

They use maybe 1 cu ft an hour of chipped wood, so the chipper would be run only sporadically...the gensets they use are at least 10kw. And I think they have a 26kw version...

The biggest constraint I see is how many battery chargers are you going to have, and how fast can you charge them? Say you are charging at 10 amps, you could have maybe 100-130 chargers running (each with a 12v deep cycle, assuming a 20kw set-up and 80% loss)....have you factored in the cost of extension cords and chargers? Even assuming half the power goes to refrigeration, that is a lot of chargers and cords needed....

You can also run an Art Car on those directly into the vehicle engine (gets about 50% of the HP you normally would get using gas)

BBadger · Post by **BBadger** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 3:39 pm

The OP probably should've posted links to the price and documents of these machines. Here is a link for your convenience:

GEK Gasifier

They cost from $17,000 to $26,000 for 10kW and 20kW models respectively.

Major Krash · Post by **Major Krash** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 6:21 pm

...and do not forget the char left over...that is a real MOOP issue on the Playa (think coffee ground tar)