I met the CEO of a Kalex Systems recently, really neat guy with a fascinating company. The company’s technology is based on the Kalina Cycle, a method for recovering heat and converting it into mechanical power. I get excited about technologies like this because so much of the available energy at our disposal is thrown away as waste heat, everything from the exhaust your car produces to industrial processes.

What Kalex is doing is building small scale power plants that convert a variety of heat sources into power. For example, in China the company is building power plants that convert waste heat from cement factories into electricity. Concrete doesn’t dry, it cures as a result of a chemical reaction, and a major by product of that chemical reaction is heat. Up until now there hasn’t been an efficient method to capture heat, consolidate it, and convert it into power.

It’s often said that reducing our dependence on fossil fuels will come as a result of incremental innovations across a portfolio of solutions. Kalex is one such innovation that makes possible the development a wide range of industrial power plants, whether from the methane produced by a dairy farm (biomass) to waste heat (municipal waste) to geothermal.