All Power Labs
1010 Murray Street , Berkeley, California, United States

ALL Power Labs designs, engineers, and manufactures biomass gasification energy platforms.  We create physical tools and information resources for people to be able to make and use renewable energy.  We believe that a bottom up, participatory ecology in energy is just as possible as it has been in computing. And we expect the impact of such creative self-determination in energy will be no less transforming than has been in digital realms.  The ALL Power Labs team is an unusual combination of experienced, hands-on fabricators and university-trained scientists and engineers. Imagine a mash up of the Bay Area California art/tech underground with Phd techies from Stanford and MIT. The result is a powerful combination of technical ability and physical know how for building real things in the real world.  We are a group not enamored with designy concepts and dead-end demonstration projects. Rather, we focus on that which can be effectively built and deployed, immediately and in volume, with broad impact and relevance.  Eight years after our founding we’ve grown to 35 full time employees, and support full engineering, design for manufacturing, and production manufacturing capabilities.  Our facility is located in Berkeley California.  You are welcome to visit next time you are in town.

Carbon and Climate

Biomass-based solutions to climate change are of unique interest in that the hardest problem—the capture and storage of atmospheric CO2—is already solved and globally installed at scale in the form of plant photosynthesis. We don’t have to start from scratch, as with expensive direct capture of atmospheric CO2; we only have to process the biomass in some form that prevents the captured CO2 from returning to atmosphere.

When fueled by sustainably-sourced biomass, power generation with a Power Pallet is a carbon-neutral process. However, the Power Pallet can also stabilize a portion of the biomass carbon, which would have been released in natural decomposition, into a carbon-rich waste byproduct – biochar. When mixed with soil, the carbon in the biochar can be sequestered from the atmosphere for centuries or more, making the Power Pallet one of the only carbon-negative technologies currently ready for global deployment.

Biomass-based energy generation has long been considered carbon neutral to an approximation, as the carbon released during combustion was recently removed from the atmosphere to make the biomass.  No new carbon is added to the terrestrial and atmospheric carbon cycle, as no ancient fossil carbon is dug up and reintroduced to the cycle.  The Biomass Gasification + Biochar solution uses the charcoal byproduct gasification during power generation, as the carbon store that can be collected and sequestered.  Sequestration is much easier than flue stack CO2 gas capture and storage, as char is a solid and easy to handle. Biochar is equally important as a soil amendment, with surprisingly powerful benefits to plant productivity, soil biological activity, water retention, pest management and mineral uptake in plants.  And as it is known to be stable in soil for 100s to 1000s of year timeframes, it is a low tech and cheap method for carbon storage, already with a scaled infrastructure via global agriculture.  The combination is an unique “win, win win” across energy, agriculture and climate management.

Carbon Emission Factor

These charts show the emission intensity of various energy production systems. The range of factors describe the potential intensity for a variety of specific analyses of lifecycle emissions for various fuel types. The left block shows the range of offsets and sequestration for electrical energy generation. You can see that biomass electricity production generates from 5x times less emissions compared with fossil natural gas, to 50x times less compared with coal electricity production.  The right hand block shows the offsets from heating. Because a CHP system is only scavenging waste heat it can offset emissions by replacing direct fossil fuel or electric heating usage while requiring no additional fuel consumption.