Farm to Flame Turns Biowaste Into Clean Energy with Innovative Generator System - The Green Voice

Farm to Flame Energy, a  company currently going through the professional incubator program at  Ascender, has set out to develop power generators that are smokeless,  odorless, and easy to use. The system would transform construction, food  processing, and agricultural waste, otherwise known as biomass, into  low-cost electricity that also creates far less carbon emissions  compared to conventional diesel generators.

Kwaku Jyamfi,  president and CEO of Farm to Flame Energy, became involved with the  company after founder Will McKnight reached out to him. At the time,  McKnight, who was a classmate of Jyamfi's at Syracuse University, was  looking for a way to build on a process patented by his grandfather and  uncle.

"He wanted to commercialize it into a generator for  developing nations who have a lot of this agricultural and wood waste,"  says Jyamfi. "And, you know, they also use diesel generators because  they have a lot of blackouts. So they want to replace those diesel  generators, and they're very expensive."

At the time, McKnight, a  history major, recruited Jyamfi for his skills as a chemical engineering  major in SU's College of Engineering and Computer Science. Jyamfi  graduated from SU in 2018 and pursued graduate degrees in environmental  engineering and Engineering and Technology Innovation Management at  Carnegie Mellon University.

Also involved is Stefano Alva, a CMU graduate who came on as the company's chief financial officer.

The  effort to advance the technology is personal for Jyamfi, a Ghanaian  American whose relatives who still live in Ghana have told him of their  troubles with constant blackouts, according to a profile published by SU's The Newhouse. It goes on to say that in 2016 alone, the West African country experienced a total of 159 days without power.

Jyamfi  believes the Farm to Flame generators could help solve the energy  issues faced by people in many countries around the world, all without  putting additional strain on the environment, as the generators would  run on briquettes that burn cleaner than conventional wood or charcoal.

                                           

                                        

Jyamfi points out that the generators could also provide  relief during disasters when mass outages would occur. He cites the  recent crisis in Texas when sudden, severe winter storms resulted in  millions of people across the state losing power for days or even weeks  on end.

The company has made quite the impression in the few years  since it started. In 2018, it first gained attention as a regional  finalist for the prestigious Hult Prize, a globally recognized honor  dubbed the "Nobel Prize for student startups." This past February, Farm  to Flame won a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research Phase I EPA Grant to  "help commercialize its fuel processor which provides scalable,  end-to-end electricity generation systems for underserved communities,"  says a press release.

Right now, Jyamfi says they are in the  nascent stages of bringing the product to market. Farm to Flame  established a partnership to deploy its generator through the Syracuse  Center of Excellence, and secured a long-term generating agreement with  the University of Calabar in Nigeria. Jyamfi calls the latter a big,  multimillion-dollar project that involves replacing the school's current  diesel generators with a "solar and biomass hybrid."

"So, they  will be using these biomass generators in combination with solar to help  the school save money and also save on emissions," says Jyamfi.

He  says they plan on deploying systems to a few pilot customers by June.  Ideally, they hope to have a generator ready to sell in major retailers  like Tractor Supply Company or Lowe's.

"By the end of 2021, we  want to have gathered enough data from these pilots to be able to make a  reproducible system that we can have functioning at a very high level,"  says Jyamfi.