Garage Invention Turns Restaurants Into Power Plants

By Alexis Madrigal

Would you like power with those fries?

A new garage-engineered generator burns the waste oil from restaurants' deep fryers to generate electricity and hot water. Put 80 gallons of grease into the Vegawatt each week, and its creators promise it will generate about 5 kilowatts of power.

That's about 10 percent of the total energy needs of Finz, a seafood restaurant in Dedham, Massachusetts, where the first Vegawatt is being tested. At New England electricity rates, the system offsets about $2.50 worth of electricity with each gallon of waste oil poured into it.

Vegawatt's founder and inventor, James Peret, estimates that restaurants purchasing the $22,000 machine will save about $1,000 per month in electricity costs, for a payback time of two years.

"You take this waste resource and make it a profit center," said Peret, who spent four long years cooking up the project in his garage. "When I started telling people, they said, 'Someone's gotta have done this.' I'd run into more people. They'd say, 'Why hasn't anyone done this?' My only response was, 'I don't know; it seems like a good idea.'"

While Vegawatt is a small solution, Peret's invention is a very clever embodiment of several long-cherished alternative-energy ideas: capturing both the heat and power from fuel combustion, making energy where it's used, and recycling used resources. Big industrial plants that make paper, for example, have long taken advantage of these concepts to save on their utility bills, but the Vegawatt will be the first product that could turn thousands of fast food restaurants into mini power plants.

"Now the restaurant owners are going to be motivated to put every single drop of waste oil into this thing, because it will pay for itself," Peret said.

And importantly, it provides convenience for restaurateurs or Burger King managers, instead of subtracting it, like so many green solutions seem to.

Restaurants that fry delicious things like chicken and french fries generate dozens of gallons of waste oil that have to be stored in barrels out back. Because used cooking oil is considered a low-grade hazardous material, they haven't been allowed to just throw it away; they generally had to pay rendering-plant operators to come. But it is now a sellers' market for grease.

Higher crude prices have made other types of oil more expensive. Biodiesel makers and renderers have become increasingly willing to pay up to 40 cents a gallon for the stuff. There have even been reports of "biodiesel pirates" stealing fryer grease.

In fact, Vegawatt is derived from the home-brew fuel movement that many trace back to Dr. Thomas Reed, who popularized a recipe to convert waste cooking oil into biodiesel more than 20 years ago. Peret converted his truck to run on straight vegetable oil, or SVO to home brewers. But he was troubled by the inefficiency of the process.

"If you want to run waste vegetable oil in your car, it's not as simple as going behind a restaurant and filling up," Peret said. "People that do this spend the majority of their free time collecting fuel from restaurants."

Peret realized he could use the same engine technology to power an on-site generator and defray a restaurant's electricity costs.

"It's not difficult to go from spinning tires to spinning magnets," he said

So he created a test unit — which you can see at the back of his garage in the top photo — that's basically a diesel generator hacked to run waste cooking oil. It feeds power directly into the restaurant's electrical system through a 30 amp hook-in.

Vegawatt is more efficient than a typical coal or natural gas plant. Peret said it can capture 70 percent of the fuel's caloric value. That's because the generator captures and uses the waste heat it generates.

"All the water [the restaurant] would send to its boiler, instead of sending it straight there from the city, we run it through our heat exchanger first," Peret said. "Depending on the flow, [the water] can go into the hot water heater at 120 degrees." (This non-electrical energy savings is included in the 5-kilowatt rating cited above.)

The big power plants, though technically very efficient, waste most of the fuel they burn. After accounting for all the sources of energy waste "what you are left with ... is just 27.6 units of usable energy out of every 100 units you started with," energy researcher Benjamin Sovacool explained in his recent book, The Dirty Energy Dilemma. "In terms of making toast, it would have been nearly four times more efficient just to burn a lump of coal and place your bread over the flame."

Biomass energy sources — like waste wood, switchgrass or cooking oil — are best when used right near the source of their creation. Dragging the stuff creates more emissions and raises the cost of the fuel. Vegawatt doesn't have that problem. By company estimates, the Vegawatt generates 50 percent less carbon dioxide than a comparable amount of electricity from a coal power plant.

"In terms of the amount of energy that it takes to transport this waste, it's a french fry," Peret said. "You just feed the guy who is picking up the bucket and pouring it into the system."

Forest Gregg, an alternative-fuels expert and author of last year's SVO: Powering Your Vehicle with Straight Vegetble Oil, called it a "nifty application and a great business idea."

Gregg also drew attention to a strong part of Vegawatt's pitch: that it won't require "intervention or maintenance by restaurant staff." That's because when users buy a system — or lease it for $450 a month — they get a service contract with the company for cleaning and maintenance.

The owner of the very first Vegawatt, George Carey (pictured above), seems pleased with the unit, too. He heartily endorses the company on its website, saying, "The Vegawatt system enables me to significantly reduce my energy costs, generate clean energy on-site, and very importantly, reduce the heavy energy footprint of my restaurant."

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Scientists discover why some people are better with faces than names

Researchers have discovered that Oxytocin, a hormone well known for its role in helping mothers to bond with their babies during breastfeeding, is also involved in helping people recognise familiar faces.

The findings are the first time to shown the hormone in important in helping to remember social interaction.

"Recognising a familiar face is a crucial feature of successful social interaction in humans," said Dr Peter Klaver at the University of Zurich, the senior author of the new study, which was led by Ulrike Rimmele, PhD, at New York University. "In this study, we investigated for the first time the systematic effect of oxytocin on social memory in humans."

Dr Klaver and his colleagues had the study participants use a nasal spray containing either oxytocin or a placebo and then showed them images of faces and inanimate objects, including houses, sculptures, and landscapes.

Participants were given a surprise test when they returned the next day - they were shown some of the images they had seen the day before as well as some new ones and were asked to distinguish between images that were "new," images that they specifically "remembered" being show the previous day.

The volunteers who used the oxytocin spray more accurately recognised the faces they had seen before than did those in the placebo group.

Dr Larry Young at Emory University, an expert on oxytocin who was not involved in the study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, said the results had wide implications.

He said: "This has important implications for disorders such as autism, where social information processing is clearly impaired."

Assessment technique lets scientists see brain aging before symptoms appear

UCLA scientists have used innovative brain-scan technology developed at UCLA, along with patient-specific information on Alzheimer's disease risk, to help diagnose brain aging, often before symptoms appear. Published in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, their study may offer a more accurate method for tracking brain aging.

Researchers used positron emission tomography (PET), which allows "a window into the brain" of living people and specifically reveals plaques and tangles, the hallmarks of neurodegeneration. The PET scans were complemented by information on patients' age and congnitive status and a genetic profile.

"Combining key patient information with a brain scan may give us better predictive power in targeting those who may benefit from early interventions, as well as help test how well treatments are working," said study author Dr. Gary Small, who holds UCLA's Parlow-Solomon Chair on Aging and is a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

Scientists took PET brain scans of 76 non-demented volunteers after they had been intravenously injected with a new chemical marker called FDDNP, which binds to plaque and tangle deposits in the brain. Researchers were then able to pinpoint where these abnormal protein deposits were accumulating.

They reported that older age correlated with higher concentrations of FDDNP in the medial and lateral temporal regions of the brain, areas involved with memory, where plaques and tangles usually collect. The average age of study volunteers was 67.

Thirty-four of the 76 volunteers carried the APOE-4 gene allele, which heightens the risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. This group demonstrated higher FDDNP levels in the frontal region of the brain, also involved in memory, than study participants without allele.

"We found that for many volunteers, the imaging scans reflected subtle brain changes, which take place before symptoms manifest," said Small, who is also director of the UCLA Center on Aging.

Small noted that the brain will try to compensate for any problems, which is why cognitive symptoms may not become apparent until much later.

"This type of scan offers an opportunity to see what is really going on in the brain," he said.

Another subset of the volunteers had mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a condition that increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. These 36 volunteers had higher measures of FDDNP in the medial temporal brain regions than normal volunteers. Those who had both MCI and the APOE-4 gene had higher concentrations of FDDNP in the medial temporal brain regions than volunteers who had MCI but not APOE-4.

"We could see more advancing disease in those with mild cognitive impairment, who are already demonstrating some minimal symptoms," Small said. "Eventually, this imaging method, together with patient information like age, cognitive status and genetics, may help us better manage brain aging."

According to Small, in the future, brain aging may be controlled similarly to high cholesterol or high blood pressure. Patients would receive a brain scan and perhaps a genetic test to predict their risk. Medications and other interventions could be prescribed, if necessary, to prevent or delay future neurodegeneration, allowing doctors to protect a healthy brain before extensive damage occurs. The brain scans may also prove helpful in tracking the effectiveness of treatments.

PET, combined with the FDDNP probe, is the only imaging technology that offers a full profile of neurodegeneration that includes measures of both plaques and tangles — the physical evidence of Alzheimer's disease in the brain.

"The fact that we can see tau tangles as well as amyloid plaques is critically important in early detection of brain aging, since the tangles are the first abnormal proteins that appear in the brain, long before dementia is clinically obvious to the physician," said Dr. Jorge R. Barrio, a study author and professor of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Such subtleties allow more insight into how the plaques and tangles spread and ultimately how Alzheimer's disease may develop.

Currently, the new FDDNP-PET scans are used in a research setting, but clinical trials are in development to bring the technology to wider patient use.

The study was funded by both government and nonprofit agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation and the Tamkin Foundation.

Additional UCLA authors include Prabha Siddarth, Ph.D.; Alison C. Burggren, Ph.D.; Linda M. Ercoli, Ph.D.; Karen J. Miller, Ph.D.; Dr. Helen Lavretsky; and Susan Y. Bookheimer, Ph.D, all from the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA; Vladimir Kepe, Ph.D.; S.C. Huang, Ph.D.; and Michael E. Phelps, Ph.D. from the UCLA Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology; and Paul M. Thompson, Ph.D., and Greg M. Cole, Ph.D., from the UCLA Department of Neurology.

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer more than 323 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Four alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.