Principal Solar names finance
expert to board of directors
Principal Solar Inc., a renewable-energy holding company in Dallas, has appointed John R. Harris to its board of
directors. Harris is a veteran of the IT
and business process outsourcing industries, with more than 35 years of
experience in CEO and senior executive
positions.
Harris currently is an operating partner and investor with GlendonTodd
Capital and CEO of Chemical Information Services. Before that he served as
president and CEO of e Telecare Global
Solutions and as CEO of Seven World
Wide and several private equity-backed
technology service companies.
Harris graduated from the University
of West Georgia with bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in business administration.
The Energy & Environmental Research
Center (EERC) at the University of North
Dakota, Grand Forks, has announced it
is leading a project to develop an efficient, renewable electricity technology for coffee-processing plants. The
EERC is working with Stowe,Vt.-based
Wynntryst LLC, a provider of bioenergy
project consultation, design, and implementation, to develop a gasification
power system to use the waste from
a coffee-processing plant to produce
energy.
The project focuses on the waste
from the Waterbury, Vt., plant of Green
Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. (GMCR),
maker of Keurig individual coffee cups
and worldwide distributor of coffee
products. The waste stream includes
coffee residues, plastic packaging, paper, cloth or burlap, and plastic cups.
The project will convert the mostly renewable and biobased waste into electricity for the coffee industry.
“The first step of the project is to
demonstrate that we can gasify the
complex mixture of waste and produce
clean synthetic gas, or syngas, by utilizing the EERC’s novel advanced fixed-bed
gasifier (AFBG) system on the biomass–
residue mixture,” said Project Manager
and Research Scientist Nikhil Patel.
The syngas then will either be used
in an internal combustion engine (or a
fuel cell) for efficient production of electricity and heat or be converted to high-value biofuels or chemicals. The pilot-scale tests will evaluate the quality of
syngas that can be produced from the
Green Mountain waste. EERC researchers will fine-tune the technology to meet
high environmental standards.
EERC works at converting coffee waste to energy
