Oh, they're pushing their thermoelectric stove scheme again. We went through this before on HN. You might be able to charge a cell phone (a nice feature for a camp stove) or get a little LED lighting. That's about it.
Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters.[1]
Stirling engines built into a wood stove is a mature technology capable of delivering lots of power (kWs for a regular wood stove found in a home). Simple to build.
As for pollution, no-one can deny that, but the rocket stove bunch claim much reduced emissions compared to even modern wood stoves (which I personally find hard to believe). But still, billions of people are still using wood to heat their homes; that's not going to change soon. Reusing that to produce electricity as a byproduct is something that some people call 100% efficient.
> Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters
open fires is terrible for air pollution because the temperature is indeed quite low, which leads to a lot of material not burning and ending up in the air, but you can easily[1] build a stove which burns way better.
Then regarding electricity production, a fireplace insert usually produce 5-15kW of thermal energy around 800°C, which you can pretty cheaply convert to at least 1kW of electricity. That's way more than what you were talking about.
I'm watching Raised By Wolves, and I'll try to keep any spoilers out but you might scroll past anyway.
Burning organic matter means half of the nutrients in the material float away with the wind, so you don't want to combust it for any reason (and especially not for disposal, which is currently my biggest beef with the show).
So I like biomass, and I don't like biomass. As I understand it, you can limit your losses in that respect by separating your ramial (young) wood out. It's higher protein and nutrient content, suitable for composting if done correctly. But most of your coppice is going to be ramial wood, so where's your sustainable harvesting angle?
The only tech I know that completely avoids that problem (Super Critical Water Oxidation) requires pressure vessels and very high tech ceramics. Last I checked it was so expensive they only used it for superfund site cleanup. Turns out salts become highly corrosive at high pressures and temperatures, and there's a triangle of heat, pressure and corrosion for ceramics, so you need ceramic composites to build a reaction chamber with any sort of durability.
You wouldn't want one of these in your basement, let alone your kitchen.
Burning biomass, usually at rather low temperatures, is terrible for air quality. One fireplace produces pollution comparable to a few thousand natural gas heaters.[1]
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Bay-Area-pollution-ag...