Kumar Plocher

Founder and CEO, Yokayo Biofuels, Inc.

In1998, Kumar Plocher picked up a spiral-bound first edition of Josh Tickell's book From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank while browsing at the counter cultural retail store Real Goods, where his then girlfriend, Sunny Beaver, worked. Kumar soon learned about the local scene, including Dave Williamson's work running the Berkeley Ecology Center's recycling fleet on biodiesel, but he had no need for a car as a Berkeley resident. The book did motivate him, however, to pin a fantasy drawing of his dream vehicle -- a VW bus pulling a home-brew rig like Tickell's -- on a wall.

When Sunny got a job designing solar energy systems for Real Goods in Hopland, they moved up to Mendocino County where Kumar did need a car. It was Kumar's dad, a CPA and now Yokayo's controller, who suggested that Kumar respond to a dead Ford Escort and a high pressure Prius salesman by implementing at least part of his dream vehicle. Kumar bought a diesel Mercedes station wagon, acquired some walnut oil biodiesel made by a friend, and began to pursue the very simple goal of enabling the use of 1000 gallons of biodiesel per month in the Ukiah Valley.

The events of 9/11, Kumar says, motivated him to "go for it," and Sunny had the good paying job that allowed him to leave the local tech start-up where he worked and pursue what had become his passion. Sunny worked with him to build Yokayo into a successful, vertically integrated company that collects local used restaurant fryer oil, processes it into biodiesel in their own plant, and distributes it both in bulk and retail in the region.

Though it was difficult to find fuel initially, and tedious to distribute out of the back of Kumar's dad's pick-up, Yokayo found a thriving market among local farmers and environmentalists for their first 2,500 gallon load, which had come all the way from Connecticut. Kumar credits the region's organic wineries with getting Yokayo off the ground. The green operations director of Fetzer Vineyard, the "Earth Friendly Winery," told Yokayo that he wanted Fetzer to be the "feather in Yokayo's cap." Ironically, over time, wineries have become less a part of Yokayo's client base as their fleets have grown and their use has switched to B20, which Yokayo is just beginning to sell. Local agricultural companies, especially small farmers, continue to be Yokayo's steadiest customers, along with customers of Berkeley's B100 station, Biofuel Oasis.

Yokayo's website chronicles much of the history of the company, including the details of how it survived the economic downturn and the dry spells in between tax incentive checks. One entry says, "On April 19th, 2011, the 'rainbow check' arrived from the IRS, and as our bookkeeper, Sunny, walked to the bank to deposit it, a rare circumhorizontal arc "rainbow across the sky" appeared over Ukiah. The old debts would be paid, and the remainder would go into savings. Yokayo Biofuels was in the black."

Kumar stresses that after receiving that check, Yokayo, which has also received Rural Development grants through USDA, became focused on becoming sustainably solvent. "This year started out a bit scary," Kumar says. "But then we were bolstered by the news that we had been selected to receive a California Energy Commission grant, which we wrote to allow for upgrades, including a new enzymatic biodiesel production process designed specifically to make the company safer, greener, and subsidy proof," he added. The news resulted in the company moving full-speed ahead, borrowing money to pay for engineering work to start immediately, and definitely made the company feel like it was back in driver's seat.

"The business of biodiesel is never easy," says Kumar. Before state funds can be released, a paperwork technicality still needs to be worked out. Kumar remains confident, however, that the project, which will bring their biodiesel projection capacity up to 700,000 gallons per year, will be completed even if it has to happen in a more piecemeal way. His advice to other CEC applicants is to be tenacious, use every resource available, and call on friends and colleagues with relevant experience.

Kumar says that for Yokayo, and many in the state's biodiesel industry, timing is critical. The task is to get production to scale before it's too late. He points to the recent problems with RINS and the lack of a federal tax incentive as reasons why producers now have to run very tight ships and be flexible in order to survive. With investment capital harder to find, Kumar recently met with Chinese investors, which was the first time this idealistic, deep ecologist, seriously thought about moving beyond a strictly local strategy. Yokayo, whose close management team (including family members) for a long time had an easy route to consensus, is also changing its corporate structure. Layoffs in 2010 changed the team and the dynamic, and as the company builds back up with new people (18 now), they are creating new approaches to decision making. Kumar is ceding some authority to a new corporate operating system under a new company constitution and process that involves self-sufficiency for some units within company.

Yokayo is beginning to sell B20 for the first time, and expects to increase the company's business with larger fleets. The company has taken over the operation of the biodiesel fueling station in Laytonville, first established by biodiesel pioneer Kimber Holmes, and plans to include the sale of B20 and above through a new card lock system. Though Kumar's 5-year plan includes getting involved in cultivating local non-food crops for feedstock, the challenge now is working with brown (and trap) grease, which factor heavily into the grant proposal submitted to the CEC, at a time when there are not many experts to call on. To meet the challenges of getting the feedstock into a usable form, Yokayo is working with North Carolina's Piedmont Biofuels with an eye toward their enzymatic biodiesel processing technology.

Kumar is a highly valued CBA board member, who has worked over the years to address the regulatory hurdles faced by biodiesel in the state. At the national level, Kumar has worked to promote sustainability as a member of the National Biodiesel Board's Sustainability Task Force and to preserve the federal tax incentive, which he believes we must lobby for even as we make every effort to move beyond. In 2007, Kumar won the Business Person of the Year award from the Greater Ukiah Chamber of Commerce. In his announcement of funding for Yokayo under the USDA's Bioenergy Program for Advanced Biofuels, Congressman Mike Thompson, called Yokayo "a model of how green businesses can grow our economy."

Undaunted by the challenges faced by biodiesel over the years, including confusion about biofuels in the food versus fuel debate among Congress and the public, Kumar is committed to keeping people excited about biodiesel and the important role it can play in helping to break our country's fossil fuel addiction. This includes another biodiesel passion -- diesel hybrid passenger cars. Incredulous that they aren't rolling off assembly lines in this country, Kumar says that he's obsessed with doing whatever it takes to correct that situation. Readers of this column would most likely be enthusiastic buyers of not only the book Kumar says he may write on this subject, but of the cars that run on biodiesel and get 100 mpg. We wish him luck.