CEO, CTO and Founder at Village Industrial Power - Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Village Industrial Power (VIP) has developed an innovative portable, biomass- based steam power plant - transforming waste biomass residues into the thermal, mechanical and electrical energy specifically designed to meet the needs of many smallholder farmers. Carl Bielenberg, VIP's CTO, has made significant innovations to the uniflow steam engine making it 2-3x more efficient than traditional steam engines. He has also designed a high efficiency boiler that produces the super heated steam used to run the engine.In many cases the excess biomass crop waste is seen as a nuisance and is burned or left to rot. The high efficiency design of the VIP boiler is clean burning and captures 70% of the energy value of biomass fuels compared to 10-15% generated by traditional methods. This makes VIP an attractive alternative not only to traditional methods but also to diesel fuel which is expensive, at times scarce and polluting.