Potsdam company building biomass plants with German firm

POTSDAM  —  ZeroPoint Clean Tech, Inc. is working with a German engineering firm to build turn-key biomass power plants.

The partnership between Potsdam–based ZeroPoint and an Essen, Germany–based company called Envirotherm GmbH centers on erecting combined heat and power plants under engineering, procurement, and construction arrangements. The plants are as small as 2 megawatts and as large as 20 megawatts.

“We are excited about this important step forward in the biomass gasification market,” ZeroPoint CEO John Gaus said in a news release. “To date, many project developers have experienced difficulty in arriving at optimal technical solutions as well as aligning proper resources to reliably construct and commission operating projects. As a result, it is also difficult for small developers to achieve financing or for interested customers to get the [combined heat-and-power] plant they desire.”

Envirotherm has the gasification expertise to build standardized plants in Europe and North America, Gaus said. Two of the plants are currently online in Europe and construction is set to start on eight more by the end of the year.

“We are highly impressed with the ZeroPoint biomass gasification technology and excited to work with leading developers, [original equipment manufacturers], and investors in this renewable-energy marketplace,” Envirotherm Managing Director Hansjobst Hirschfelder said.

ZeroPoint provides biomass technology to generate renewable energy and sequester carbon. The company is developing distributed biomass projects in North America and has joint-venture relationships in Northern Europe, the United Kingdom, South America, and Southeast Asia.

Envirotherm is a subsidiary of Allied Resource Corp. of Wayne, Penn. It focuses on plant engineering.

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com