Company Snapshot

Founded:		2005
Headquarters:		Canton, Massachusetts USA
Product:		Final stages of prototype development
Investor:		MagCap Engineering, LLC

Our Vision

Voltree integrates emerging, innovative technologies into large-scale automation systems. We provide cost-effective, environmentally responsible solutions for corporate and government clients in a variety of arenas.

We are guided by the overarching philosophy that it is ethically imperative, politically advantageous and, finally, technologically feasible to generate high return on investment by being environmentally conscientious.

Voltree’s vision can be summarized by our motto: “Green from Green by Innovation”.

We have created a patent-pending “bioenergy harvester” that converts living plant metabolic energy to useable electricity. Our Voltree Power Module is a unique battery replacement alternative that removes the last bottleneck from the practical deployment of large-scale mesh networks.

Our first application is to power the nodes of the Early Wildfire Alert Network (EWAN). EWAN is a highly automated, long-lived, maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensing system that helps predict and instantly detect forest wildfires with unprecedented cost efficiency.

In the near future our goal is to solve previously intractable problems by adapting our bioenergy harvesting and conversion technologies to various applications. Our immediate focuse is low-power transceiver networks and automation systems for a range of automation solutions addressing the needs of homeland security, environmental and agricultural monitoring and meteorology and climate science.

The Early Wildfire Alert System (EWAN)

According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), wood products constitute approximately 45% of all U.S. material consumption by tonnage. Along with aiding the preservation of timberland, EWAN will help alleviate the burden of FEMA and other state assistance programs while eliminating the need for fossil-fuel dependent air and ground surveillance. Such an environmentally sustainable detection system could significantly reduce suppression costs, property damage, lost natural resources, and restoration costs as well. On an annual basis, total savings range from millions to billions of dollars.

Nearly 33% of the United States’ land area (747,000,000 acres) is comprised of forest land, according to the USDA Forest Service (USDA FS). Of this, 247 million acres are federally owned while 500 million acres are classified as timberland. In 2006, the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) reported nearly 100,000 wildland fires claiming a record ten million acres. Suppression costs for the 2006 wildland fires amounted to over one billion dollars excluding the cost of more than two thousand buildings destroyed.

In close consultations with the USDA FS, Voltree Power has determined that there is an imminent need to develop an autonomous small battery maintenance system to power a low-power distributed sensor communications network in order to provide early stage fire detection and fire dynamics prediction. Our technology will offer a great service to the firefighting agencies and enhance their ability to detect wildland fire starts and expand weather and data collection through the already existing Remote Automated Weather System (RAWS).

With over a billion dollars in annual suppression costs already being incurred, there are currently no feasible alternatives to today’s forest fire detection systems; these range from ground and air patrol to surveillance towers and satellite detection systems. The continual rise of fuel costs, global climate change, the president’s initiative to seek alternative energy sources and the increased need for energy independence make the autonomous and inexpensive sensor nodes of EWAN a crucial step in the right direction.

We further believe that EWAN addresses, to varying degrees, all six specific public interest concerns of the USDA.

Our most profound impact will be on:

1. “Protecting and Enhancing the Nation’s Natural Resource Base and Environment”

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