founder's statement

We thought it would be a good idea to step away from the fancy pages and only just relevant images and take a minute to describe what we want to build and, in building it, what problems we are looking to solve.

The first problem is waste – specifically food and green waste; it’s wet and heavy, it gets driven around the country for miles in diesel-powered lorries, it gets disposed of either in ‘sustainable’ AD plants or (more often than you’d think) quietly dumped into landfill where it decomposes into all sorts of unpleasant gases. According to the Waste and Resources Action Programme, in 2021/22 a total of 6.4 million tonnes of food  waste was generated from UK households – rising to 9.5 million when you add in restaurants, supermarkets etc.

The second problem, and bear with us here, is electric vehicles (or EVs) – now we don’t want to get into a debate about whether they are the sustainable, long-term solution to the mass-transport fuelling issue, as that is a complex and political one – it is however the direction that governments both here in the UK and throughout Europe have committed to.  To be more precise, the problem is charging them – most people can’t do it at home, there aren’t enough places that you can do it (and where you can it all slows down if lots of you want to do it at once) and, most importantly, there isn’t enough power in the Grid to let you do it, even if there were enough charging points to go round.

“Getting the right number of chargers is not a challenge, getting enough power for those chargers to actually operate well enough for EV drivers is a major, major problem.” Ken McMeikan, CEO Moto Hospitality, UK motorway service stations operator

Jerry, who is very much the brains of the outfit, found both of these problems very annoying; wasting food is bad enough, but not using that waste efficiently and productively makes it worse – having a fancy EV (Jag, since you ask) is all very well, but rendered somewhat pointless if you’re afraid to use it for any journey longer than taking Dor to the shops. Luckily, Jerry is an inventor – a Yoda-like problem solver who had already got part of the solution built and patented. He then spent the next couple of years building this out into an eco-system of new ideas, layered on top of existing technology, that has resulted in Ximopower – a complete, localised, waste-2-power solution that disrupts the current collection, distribution and processing model for handling food waste and creates small (3.5 MhW), safe and clean power plants that, along with solar and wind harvesting, deliver power straight to the on-site EV charging points. Fast, local, sustainable and, because we’re making it ourselves, extremely affordable – we call these the Ximo PowerParks.

However good this sounds, we wanted to go deeper – we want every element of the design and build to stand on its own sustainability credentials:

• the collection vehicles are all electric and charged on site;
• we don’t use tarmac but ‘passthrough’ paving instead, so we don’t disrupt the water table;
• the water extracted in the process is incredibly nutrient rich and we harvest this through Bio-Char (another by-product) enrichment and recycling into the plant;
• every surface is either an advanced solar panel (long-life and completely recyclable) or a living wall of plants – fed by some of that super-water and filtering it at the same time;
• and….

Well, there’s lots more, but also so much to learn and improve. Which is why we will work with universities and other institutions to create research opportunities and facilities. We want these PowerParks in rural and urban areas – welcomed by local communities as assets and not treated as eyesores to be blocked by planners; with drivers moving from one PowerPark to the next in a network of truly green, low-impact energy.

Oh, and we want to do it fast.

Best,

Jerry, Jamie & Luke