We Do Not Focus Merely on Waste Wood And Pay Attention to Much More

Klaus Röhrmoser from Regawatt Company answered our questions for Business Diplomacy readers

1- Could you tell us about Regawatt’s activities?

We are a German engineering group founded nearby Munich. We have been working on bioenergies, which is our area of expertise, for thirty years. Part of this is made up of biogas, but we primarily work with leftover wood, residual wood from landscape management, etc.

About thirty years ago, we started to install conventional heating plants for district heating. Then, towards the end of the 90s, we built our first steam turbine power plants that produced heat and electricity. Afterwards, we found that the efficiency of small steam power plants is low. So, our next step was to design more of the organic Rankine cycle plants that already had slightly higher efficiency. These were much easier to operate, but efficiency was still moderate. For this reason, we turned to wood gasifiers.

– What is a wood gasifier?

The wood gasifier technically ensures what happens when you burn a log of wood: The flame does not come out directly but appears ca. two centimetres away. The reason is that first, the wood is gasified, and then the wood gas is burned. This is a really clean way to burn wood. It leaves almost no dust in the exhaust, and you don’t need a filter.

However, we started to question why we did not use this gas in a gas engine and produce high energy levels in the form of electricity, even though we already produced gas, and then we did it. We developed a gas cleaning system because we cannot transfer the raw gas directly to a gas engine, and we need to clean it.

2- What does the Turkish market mean to you, and what products and services do you plan to launch here?

The good thing with Türkiye is that there is a high motivation to take the country one step further, and we see energy transition taking place in many areas here. As you know, Türkiye is not in a state of saturation like Germany in this regard. Hence, people are much more motivated. On the other hand, there is an obvious financing problem in Türkiye, but we are trying to overcome this via WISeKey. We intend to establish a production facility at a low cost to compete with other companies.

3- What are the global trends in renewable energy fields that you follow and find inspiring?

We are doing a lot of research and making progress. We have an experimental gasifier, and we are performing fuel testing. We don’t focus merely on wood or waste wood, and now we pay attention to much more.

Forestry is not so common in Türkiye, and wood is too valuable to be used only as energy. So, we’re going to experiment with different sources. That is one aspect of this matter. The other aspect is the issue of valuable products. We intend to increase the value not only of gas but also of bi-products: Our gasifiers produce bio-oil as well as gas.

Klaus Röhrmoser / ReGaWatt GmbH