DIPL. ING. THOMAS SCHUSTER
Already during my primary school ages I was fascinated by electrics and electronics. Furthermore there has been already the ambition to become energy-technical autonomic as far as possible. So the dream of an own electric power plant was born. Due to the absence of a suitable brook or river the realisation of a hydropower plant was impossible. The only possibility left was to build up a caloric power plant.
Wood should be the primary energy carrier, because this resource is sufficient available in the own forest. To increase overall efficiency, the residue heat produced by this caloric plant should be used for heating the own house. To reach maximum comfort and efficiency another request was that the plant should operate full-automated.
I compared different possible technologies and realised that woodgas technology, developed during the interwar years for driving cars and trucks, offers good conditions for the efficient operation of a small caloric power plant.
At the end of 2004 I met somebody who has just implemented the same idea based on woodgas – but not automated. I realized that, if I really wanted to build a woodgas power plant, it had to happen now, to get into the more attractive tariff regulation of the Austrian green electricity law at that time. At the end of December I had the essential governmental permissions, constructing and tinkering started from 2005.
We had no central heating, so this had to be constructed first, and also the rooms in the farm building had to be adapted. Despite adverse circumstances, thanks to the aid of my wife, my parents and some friends, I managed to connect the plant to the electric grid in June 2006. During Winter 2006/07 our house could be heated the first time without severe breakdowns. Improvements concerning easier maintenance, steady operation and efficiency followed. Over 5000 hours of operation claim that woodgas technology is simple, controllable and technically mature, and offers a good possibility to operate small cogeneration power plants with high efficiency.