Thursday, July 3, 2008

Owl Power makes on-site power from vegetable oil

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

Creative environmentalists have been eyeing the oil from restaurant deep fryers as a potential energy source for years, with most applications finding a use for it in powering vehicles.

But a new company in Boylston wants to turn the oil into something a little more useful to restaurant owners — on-site power.

Owl Power Co. Inc., founded by two longtime local product development engineers, has developed a co-generation system that runs exclusively on a restaurant’s used vegetable oil. The system, called the Vegawatt Power System, doesn’t provide enough power to a run an entire restaurant on its own, but it can provide up to one-third of an establishment’s power needs and can also be tied into the hot-water system.

Owl Power president and CEO James Peret, a former development engineer at Boston-based Insight Product Development LLC who worked on a number of well-known local projects, including the BigBelly III solar trash compactor from Seahorse Power Co. in Needham, said the company has several restaurants ready to lease the system, and commercial deployments are expected to begin in the fall.

The Vegawatt costs about $400 per month to lease and can provide about $550 worth of power, paying for itself even before the cost and trouble of unloading waste oil is factored in, said Peret.

“We’re turning a low-value waste product into a high-value resource,” he said.

Peret and his partner Chad Joshi, a former American Superconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: AMSC) engineer and founder of Lowell-based precision control device maker Energen Inc., originally designed the core of the system as an on-board power plant for a “greasecar,” a vehicle powered by used restaurant oil. But that is a crowded industry, with companies like Easthampton-based Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems LLC already making a mark.

“I thought ‘there’s not much difference between spinning tires and spinning magnets,’” he said, referring to the generator in an electric power-producing system.

The two-person company has been supported by Joshi and Peret, as well as a small amount of financing from friends and family. But with customers in queue, two patents pending and a demonstration model up and running in Peret’s garage, the company is now looking for angel funding to move forward.