[Gasification] Economy for CHP on Biomass

[jim mason]

On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Thomas Koch <TK at tke.dk> wrote:
> Tom
>
> I have been looking for niches for my gasifier technology for 10 years without identifying any.
>
> The question that i ask myselves is: Why did I develop this technology?
>
> The only reasonanble answer i can give is that there was a lot of public support money available and it was good fun.We all (us that spend public money with out thinking about market possibilities) believed that as soon as something would be working support structures would be implemented and our technologies would be sold at the price level it had.
> Like it happended to the windmills and Stirling now selling electricity at 270 EUR/MWh ~ 350 $/MWh.
>


i feel your pain thomas.  this is one of the unfortunate downsides of
public money.  it can distort the underlying economics of an endeavor
and prevent the ultimate value reckoning the technology will receive.
physics and economics will eventually hold court, no matter how much
we try to prevent the reckoning.  both are brutal jurors.  seldom does
one get an appeal and retrial.

if we conceive and engineer from the beginning with these realities in
mind, the end of public money does not end the endeavor.  in fact, it
is not even needed to start.  one of the biggest "blessings" of our
endeavor is that we had none.  we had to start and continue with
reality in the facility.  this forced us to do things differently.

working up from junk, with the important help of everyone here, we've
been able to produce a fully automated system with integrated
industrial type engine and genhead for $1700/kw.  this is at 10kw,
where meeting price points are even more difficult.  i think we need
to get this to $1000/kw for the real calculus to work out for general
use.  that's where we're going.  we are far from done.

you cannot reach these price points starting with traditional designs
and adding band aids to fix problems not well solved in the reactor.
you need to do some rethinking about the total system.  you need to do
much more with much less.  you need to not create problems in the
beginning needing more eq and space to solve downstream.

you can not assume the basic engineering in this endeavor is already
done and all we need are slight tweaks around the edges.  it's not.
you can't simply complain that people won't run things correctly and
they should better prepare their fuel.  they won't.

getting to an actually relevant and meaningful small scale
gasification solution is a multi-fronted product design problem.  it
is not simply a reactor design problem, with the rest left to other
"departments" to work out the details.  if you didn't consider
manufacturing and distribution from day one, you are likely going to
return to day one after x years of engineering, and start again.

until we deal with the full suite of issues that contribute to the end
price and user experience, we are not going to create the "lift lid,
put in junk, out comes useful things" washing machine type appliance
that the world really wants this tech to be.  or in other metaphor, a
"PC of personal scale energy".  that's what i'm trying to make.

i gently suggest the syngas/producer gas debate might really about
whether one thinks the old designs have already solved the problem, or
whether one thinks we can and need to do fundamentally better.  not
incrementally, but exponentially.  i of course argue the later, and at
times this seems to upset those who want to protect the former.


jim