Home | Volter - Pioneer in Bioenergy

From wood

Your own electricity

Pioneer in

Bioenergy

Renewable energy source

Electricity from

Our Products

We make your own electricity and heat production possible. By exploring our products you can feel our passion for uncompromised quality and functionality. Our units are modularly scalable, the electrical output is 40kW with the thermal output of 100kW.

Technology

Our innovation enables efficient electricity and heat production using your local wood resources. Wood chips are superheated into wood gas, which is a fuel for internal combustion engine that runs the generator. Heat from the process is recovered into water.

References

See our reference installation examples. Our focus has been on the same technology and size over the years. Looks and layout has changed from the containerized Outdoor model into a more compact Indoor version which utilizes the same reliable process equipment as the Outdoor version.

Volter - Pioneer in bioenergy

Adopting new renewable energy sources is one of the greatest future opportunities of our planet. Biomasses are a potential alternative to fossil fuels. There is tangible evidence of this from Kempele Ecovillage since 2009. The electricity and heat for the ten houses in Kempele Ecovillage are produced by a CHP-plant in the village using Volter’s wood gasification technology. Fuel comes from domestic wood chips. This technique replaces one liter of oil with approximately two kilograms of dry wood. Clean energy is also one of the fastest growing businesses.

We are innovators and pioneers in the development of wood gasification technology. Producing electricity from renewable energy sources does not mean that you have to give up on the comforts you are used to in your home – Kempele Ecovillage has demonstrated this to us.

Finnish forests grow by almost 100 million cubic meters a year, and just over half of it has been used in recent years. We are worried about rural depopulation, so could we not produce energy by utilizing our renewable energy sources locally and this way create more jobs in the countryside?

Volter’s CHP-plant is a self-sufficient solution that uses wood chips to provide all the electricity and heat required for an entire housing estate. For example, it takes approximately 20 cubic meters of wood to cover the annual electricity and heating needs and to charge an electric car for a family of six.

The CHP-plant produces enough electricity and heat for the annual needs of a farm, an entire small housing estate or small business. Our plants can be scaled up to multi-unit installations in order to meet the needs of growing energy demand across diverse applications. The video above highlights this aspect, meeting a larger energy demand for a wood chip business through scaling up to three connected units.

Electricity is produced by gasifying wood chips. Waste heat from the process can be used in hydronic underfloor heating, preheating of air-conditioning or domestic water, to name a few. Your CHP-plant can be landscaped to match your own surroundings.

Kempele Ecovillage is a unique product development platform for our company and our partners. Product development requires theoretical background and practical insight, but, most importantly, it requires determination and an open mind. Kempele Ecovillage came about through trials and tribulations, just like many other groundbreaking projects.

We have been developing products as part of life. We had to produce the daily electricity and heat needed in the village along with developing the equipment at the same time. This has brought about its own challenges, but it has also certainly hastened the development. We at Volter Oy believe that you learn best when needs must.

We have put together our product development team from young and motivated professionals who are fully committed to achieving our mutual goal. Our team is mainly made up of engineers. A high level of education is not, however, the be-all and end-all rather than a shared factor that gives us all a good insight into how to put ideas into practice.

We do not strive to do everything ourselves. Seamless cooperation with our subcontractors who know what we need has made it possible for us to concentrate on the areas we know best. Our personnel and subcontractors have gained invaluable knowhow through solving practical problems.

The founder of the company, Juha Sipilä, was looking for an electricity supplier for his cottage in 1998. A tender of 424,000 marks in those days made him consider building his own power station. The project turned into a self-sufficient island in terms of energy, where electricity was produced with wind and diesel with an aggregate. An idea of replacing diesel with wood chippings was soon born.

Wood gas was both a more economical and environmental alternative, and, hence, the idea tested at the cottage was turned into wider use: Kempele Ecovillage became Finland’s first housing estate that was self-sufficient and off the grid, where energy was produced independently and almost without emissions, thanks to the use of wood chips and wind power.

As a part of our customer care we arrange Volter Academies for our distributors and end users. By sharing our knowledge with technicians and engineers who maintain Volter 40 Indoor CHP’s, we secure the local support and the CHP’s running in the most efficient way.