- relative potency, when measured in terms of how they heat the atmosphere, can be tens, hundreds, or even thousands of times greater than that of CO2. The impacts of short-lived climate pollutants are especially strong over the short-term. Reducing these emissions can have an immediate beneficial impact on climate change.
Technology Background
All Power Labs has been at the forefront of small-scale gasification technologies for over 10 years, designing, engineering, building, and deploying compact biomass gasifiers, largely for off-grid power use in the developing world. In 2012, the University of Minnesota and the United States Department of Energy hired All Power Labs to build the first Powertainer — a containerized, fully functional ‘alpha’ prototype, designed to operate on the combination of corncobs and diesel. This project continued to leverage All Power Labs’ smaller units and scale it to a larger form factor to create a 150-kW power plant in a 20-foot-long container designed to operate on a variety of forest products.
The beta Powertainer uses an innovative Imbert-style downdraft gasifier paired with an internal combustion engine to produce up to 150 kW of electrical power from forest refuse biomass. The system converts a portion of the biomass into biochar, which provides agronomic and climate benefits when returned to the soil via co-composting. The 150-kW Powertainer is designed for distributed generation applications, ease of use, and deployment by integrating all the major assemblies and components into a standard 20-foot-long shipping container.
Market and Technology Challenges
The Powertainer continues to be a technology with immense potential to address and contribute towards California’s clean energy goals. The premise behind the Powertainer and its design is that it fits in a shipping container that the world already knows how to easily transport and can be moved to the sources of fuel rather than relying on large centralized plants where fuel has to be transported large distances, potentially offsetting the value of the fuel itself. The largest obstacles experienced during this project had to do with regulatory challenges, which represent the largest hurdle related to market penetration. To develop a viable portable energy solution that can address a challenge such as the tree mortality crisis, it is essential that regulatory requirements be established that better support the development of project models and energy technology options. Regulations should provide an incentive for pilot testing in real world use cases. The permitting challenges experienced during the project make a new energy technology like the Powertainer take longer to prove and bring to market. Experts anticipate that any new energy technology will experience challenges in these areas. The permitting and interconnection process proved to be cost and time prohibitive, especially for a new emerging energy technology developed by small companies. In addition, Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s experience illustrates that a utility has little incentive or interest in enabling new distributed technologies to connect with the grid. Additionally, the team experienced that permitting agencies have little familiarity with biomass energy technologies at this small scale, which results in them having to meet extreme permitting requirements. This challenges the ability for projects to get off the ground — especially emerging energy technologies.
