I had a great talk with a couple of Massachusetts entrepreneurs this past week for a web article I did on rolling out their new restaurant appliance, Vegawatt, James Peret, founder and CEO of Owl Power Co., has designed an affordable unit that will turn a restaurant's fryer grease into electricity and hot water. Read about the details of the unit in the web news story: "Vegawatt unit provides power, heat to restaurant "

Peret is taking an approach adopted by many in the biomass industry to match the technology with the feedstock. In this case, the unit is designed to handle the 50 to 80 gallons of oil a week coming from a restaurant with three to five deep fat fryers. The 5 kw generator will supply only a portion of the restaurant's power needs, and the waste heat collected will only preheat the water between the meter and the water heater, but the energy savings will amount to $800 per month in the Northeast where energy costs are among the highest in the nation.

Peret told me this is an example where economies of scale don't work. To supply all the restaurant's power needs would require a much larger generator, as well as a lot more oil. That would require getting set up to collect oil from other places, with equipment and transportation expenses increasing the overall cost. Instead, he's worked through a system to match the technology to the feedstock supply. The 5 kw prototype has been tested at a restaurant and is ready for manufacturing. Peret has begun work on a 12 kw unit for restaurants that generate 150 to 170 gallons of waste vegetable oil per week.

He's designed the system with user friendliness in mind. All the restaurant workers have to do is pour the waste oil into the unit sitting outside the back door. Owl Power Co. will monitor the equipment via internet and handle the maintenance.

A few years back when I was reporting on sustainable agriculture topics, we used to call elegant solutions like these "appropriate technologies."