Generating a Breath of Fresh Air

Steve Melito: Hey everybody, welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now, the podcast that’s powered by FuzeHub. I’m your host, Steve Melito. Today we’re talking to Kwaku Jyamfi, or KJ, the president and CEO of Farm to Flame Energy in Syracuse, new York. KJ has developed a scalable 10 to 30 kilowatt generator that uses plant-based feedstocks for electricity generation that’s smokeless and odorless and, very importantly, farm to Flame Energy was the grand prize winner of FUSUB’s 2022 commercialization competition, and that’s just some of what we’ll talk about today, KJ. Welcome to New York State Manufacturing Now.

Kwaku Jyamfi: Hi Steve, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. It’s good to be here in the presence of many New Yorkers, so thank you.

Steve Melito: Absolutely. Tell me about yourself a little bit and why you’re committed to bringing clean energy to everyone. I understand that much of your family is from Ghana and that what you saw there was consequential.

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, that’s a big part of it. I’m a first-generation American and I grew up in New Jersey, which is a very environmental state. In fact, they gave us some grants for our company as well a few subs investment and when I was in high school I was taking environmental science classes and I gained a passion for water treatment. I saw the damage and pollution that was happening to the Bromber Putra River in Bangladesh, so it was always the idea of mine to find a more cost-effective water treatment than reverse osmosis, which takes a lot of energy to remove the salt out of water. I met my co-founder, will McKnight, at Syracuse University. We were both studying in environmental engineering and we had a patented combustion process where we could take biomass and burn it with no smoke and odor, and so I thought this would be a great nexus to water treatment. Clean energy and water treatment go hand-in-hand. You know I was working in multiple research labs at Syracuse University. The Syracuse Center of Excellence still tapped in with Tammy at the Center of Excellence and that fueled my passion, and the support from there really helped to found this clean energy company, so that’s why we started.

In Ghana, electricity is a thing too. There’s a lot of brownouts in the country, and Ghana was actually one of the first countries to do renewable energy with the hydroelectric dam that they have power in most of the country. That was built sometime in the early 1900s by Kwame Nkrumah, and we actually sell so much of that electricity to neighboring countries that there’s a lot of brownouts. So that’s a big problem too, and I saw it affect my family firsthand. Same with the neighboring countries, Nigeria half the country uses diesel generators for over 12 hours a day because they don’t have enough electricity on the grid. So just knowing that this is a problem that we could tackle and it still has a strong economic driver and incentive, it was something that we were very interested in and tied to my background.

Steve Melito: Great and you’ve told us a little bit about how the company connects to your education. And you started Farm to Flame Energy as a student at Syracuse University a great school. Then you went on to another fantastic school, at Carnegie Mellon, and pursued some graduate studies. How does that all fit together?

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, Carnegie Mellon was amazing. They helped us find the warehouse that we’re in Pittsburgh. They helped us sign a $1.2 million letter of intent with a teaching hospital in Nigeria. That was the first year we incorporated. Will went out there like during my finals week of my first semester at Carnegie Mellon and he just got it signed and so we saw there was a strong need for our business and it was because of the way they coached us. I think Carnegie Mellon is probably like one of the most entrepreneurial producing schools you know in the country I have. You know just peers that I talk with, you know I was talking to them early days in my company. They went on to raise $10 million, $15 million, and this is just regular. Like even my classmates have viral products that people buy on TikTok, like the Moonwalker shoes, like these are people who, like I’ve seen them doing this since I was doing mine in the early days and they were doing theirs in the early days at the same time and it’s just the culture. They have a Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, so there’s a lot of entrepreneurs coming in there that are in the AI machine learning space and there’s just a lot of support systems, a lot of pitch competitions and business incubators at that school that help like these bright students in the especially the STEM field, commercialize a passion of theirs. And there’s a lot of great professors too, like my professor, mark DeSantis. He’s a serial entrepreneur and he became my advisor on my advisory board and he and he became my advisor on my advisory board and he has been a help to me. I’m grateful for him. You know just those who have been there before and have done it many times. To be able to get that advice is something very valuable at Carnegie Mellon, so I’m grateful for everybody over there.

Steve Melito: Great, great. And you also mentioned the Center of Excellence at Syracuse University. We’re huge fans of them and you’ve been a good user of those available resources. But let’s talk about your product a little bit. There are some pictures on your website, ftfenergy.com, and the unit looks like it’s housed in a shipping container. But what’s inside? How does it work? What feedstocks can you use and how do you keep smoking odors from escaping?

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, so inside the generator, in the shipping containers there is three. So there’s two shipping containers that house a wood boiler and it also houses the condenser I’ll get to what the condenser is and then there’s one generator that houses an auxiliary boiler and a steam turbine and generator and it also houses the generator controller. So in the first shipping container there’s a wood boiler. That boiler is fed with wood pellets and we have a unique fuel processing procedure that allows the smokeless, odorless flame to persist during electricity generation. So with that process, in our patented combustion process, we feed wood pellets into the boiler that generates pressurized steam. It’s either saturated or superheated steam. Superheated means dry steam and the steam needs to be dry because it’s then taken to a steam turbine. The steam turbine spins and it does mechanical work, basically spinning, and it’s coupled to an alternator which produces alternating current or electricity. So that alternator is also called a generator. So the steam turbine is coupled to the generator. That generator outputs electricity. And then we have an output panel on the back of the second container where we were able to plug in my Tesla charge electric vehicles. You could charge any appliance you want, you could output power to the grid and so that steam is used to drive the steam turbine generator and make power, and then the exhaust steam from the steam turbine is taken to a condenser it’s called the air-cooled condenser, which is in the first container with that wood boiler. That condenser turns the steam back into water and refeeds it into the wood boiler, so that the process continues. It’s a closed loop and the process keeps going, and so that’s essentially how the shipping container generators work circular model and the physics of how it goes.

Steve Melito: Well done, great explanation. Even for someone like me. I can understand it. So, kg, that’s the product, and a lot of these customers we found are corporations like Georgia Pacific Cocoa Processing Company.

Kwaku Jyamfi: These are corporations who have a large waste to liability, so you know a multi-billion dollar corporations who at one singular plant or mill they have to pay up to six figures a month to dispose of their waste. So the savings that will come from basically converting all of their waste into energy is very obvious and it’s very attractive to them. And then also the savings on the fuel that they use for energy. So if they’re switching from a natural gas heating system or electricity system to a biomass system, they’ll save at least 20% on their yearly energy bill. So it’s a double-edged sword for them. And because of the size of their organization they can get access to large carbon credits, internal tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act, which could pay for up to 40% of the equipment. So I mean it makes the payback period even faster, where something that had a three-year payback period to a 1.3-year payback period. So that’s the engineering, procurement and construction model, where we sell them the equipment and then we also provide an operation and maintenance contract. Then there’s the model called the power purchase agreement. This agreement the customer does not have to pay for the upfront cost of the equipment but they experience savings on diesel. It’s structured basically just like a regular electricity bill you would receive at the end of the month, and so they don’t have to pay for the upfront cost of the equipment, because they get equipment financing, if they qualify for that, and they just pay the regular electricity bill and the payback period for us or them on the generator is 2.6 years, and so there’s that model as well and that works for medium-sized and smaller businesses who want to start seeing savings faster.

Steve Melito: Good, good, and it’s helpful to have some numbers put to it. Let’s talk about another number, if we can, which is the commercialization competition award that you won, and this was $150,000 grand prize back in 2022 from FuzeHub. How did you spend that award and how did it help you to advance your technology?

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we spent that award on a power generation demonstration. We were able to demonstrate the FTF S2 generator working and generating electricity, and that allowed us to charge a Tesla. It allowed us to charge an electric vehicle. It allowed us to demonstrate electricity working and that was huge because I mean, even when we posted that video online, a New York state farm said, hey, I want to buy this generator for my farm if you’re selling these, and that’s what I envisioned from the start. It’s like I envisioned like, once this video is up, people are going to be entering the floodgates of you know, wanting this because it’s just, it’s really important. I’ve always wanted to establish trust so people know, like, what’s really inside the shipping container and that it actually works. I feel like a lot of these models, there was kind of like a holdback. People don’t really want to show what’s inside or that it works. But I mean that’s just so huge because that’s like you know, it’s more about the longevity. I really do see people using these generators. You know we will have these internationally, all over the world. So we spent the money on the demonstration and also some work that we did with Georgia Pacific and that really helped us to get some traction in our company, which led to a further business traction.

Steve Melito: Good, good, and so Farm to Flame has won several other awards as well, and one of them is an EPA Small Business Innovation Research Award, or SBIR. Can you tell us about that one in particular? It’s not easy to get an SBIR.

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely, it’s a challenge. I remember it was 2020 when we applied to that. At the time, my CCO, Stefano we were both just getting out of graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and that’s where I met him and he just had an idea to apply to as many SBIRs, we have to get one. And I was like you’re right. And so we just applied to NSF, everything, everything and I remember just the EPA one we wrote. It had a lot of coherency. It was basically taking some things that were already existing in the industry and using our patent around them and just making them more innovative. And so they gave us $100,000 to basically get a fuel processor, start to get our generator up and running, and that really helped us build this commercial generator. I mean, before testing it, before demonstrating that it works, that’s what helped us build it, because you have to build it first and then you have to show that it works, and so that was super important, I mean, and it also is what started giving us fundraising momentum.

Every award that we received, we used it as momentum for the next award, and I remember with that one, we got that and we were building the generator in New Jersey. I’m from New Jersey and we applied to the first New Jersey Clean Tech Seed Grant like the first annual one for $75,000. And we were able to get that. And then we were also able to get $25,000 in matching funds for the SBIR grant. Governor Phil Murphy was doing a matching funds at the time for the SBIR grants any companies who received them so that really helped. I mean, then we had an extra $100,000 to go even farther and then we use that momentum to get a Pittsburgh investor, the Richard King Mellon Foundation. They gave us $200,000. And then that just kept going with the momentum and the start was with that SBIR grant fields and they have like a physical product or even like a software enabled product that they feel could really have a lot of help to the public to apply for SBIRs. And someone who I would really recommend she was amazing in our grant consulting help Her name is Natalie Rudolph. We would write out the application and then she would look over it for us and basically give any feedback and recommendations because she has herself helped companies raise like at the time it was like over 16 million dollars in grants. I’m sure it’s more now. So that’s a resource I would recommend to anyone who applies. I would definitely recommend getting a consultant with a track record of helping companies get those grants to look over your proposal.

Steve Melito: Sure, and then, after you get the grants, you attract more interest. So last question for you, KJ what’s next for Farm to Flame Energy, and how can people reach you if they want to become a customer or an investor?

Kwaku Jyamfi: Yeah, that’s a great question. So we’re really just focused on putting up more and more of these units. And you know, we signed a five megawatt $20 million contract in 2023 with Cocoa Processing Company, and this is a large chocolate making company for Golden Tree and they supply a lot of the chocolate that we just consume, and so we were taking their cocoa waste to combine heat and power. There’s that project we’re putting up over 1,000 kilowatts of farm-to-flame generators on the East Coast and really just continuing to grow this team and continuing to reach our goals. By 2032, we’ll have enough generators up to power half of New York City or all of Nigeria, and so these are things that we’re just actively going after. We have a solid team and continuing to build upon that team of power plant experts, renewable energy experts. We now have a VP of engineering who came from Archaea Energy, which sold to BP in 2022 for $4 billion, and so these people are really passionate about clean energy. You know, these people are really wanting to make a difference, and we have a lot of veterans, too, who have worked in coal plants, who have worked in natural gas plants for 40 plus years, and now they’re basically handing down the skills to the next generation and they’re excited to go into renewable energy because they see these coal plants phasing out and they see that. You know, now it’s more, maybe more, natural gas plants coming up and people are starting to talk about solar, wind, biomass, different plants for 24 hour power, and so there’s a lot of excitement going on what we’re doing right now and you know any support helps go to ftfenergy.com. You can learn more about what we do LinkedIn. You know that’s where we are and we’ll just continue to keep working and growing.

Steve Melito: Excellent, exciting times. KJ, thanks so much for being part of New York State Manufacturing Now.

Kwaku Jyamfi: Thank you, Steve, I appreciate it.

Steve Melito: So we’ve been talking to KJ, the president and CEO of Farm to Flame Energy in Syracuse, New York. You’re going to be hearing a lot about Syracuse these days and not just because Micron is building a chip plant there. Syracuse is also the site of this year’s New York State Innovation Summit. Syracuse is also the site of this year’s New York State Innovation Summit. It’s happening on October 28th and 29th at the On Center right in downtown Syracuse. To learn more, go to NYSInnovationSummit.com and if you didn’t get that URL, don’t worry, just email us at info at FuzeHub.com. So, on behalf of FuzeHub and New York State Manufacturing now, this is Steve Melito signing off.