Completely unrelated to the current political climate in the United States, did you know Washington D.C. is partially powered by a sewage plant? No, seriously.
That’s right, just this week the D.C. Water utility company has announced a bioenergy facility that makes use of resident’s waste water into producing methane gas which can than be burned to generate electricity — To the tune of 10 megawatts! The facility is saving the company an estimated $10 million a year in energy bills.
Simply put, the liquid is removed from the sewage water and the solids are refined into a type of fuel. Those solids are heated, mixed, and sterilized into a form that can be easily digested by a certain type of microbe, which then in turn produce methane for burning. For a more detailed explanation, check out the info-graphic from the Washington Post explaining the entire process.
And on a smaller scale, you could do something like this in your very own backyard.
Anyone else read Washington (the state) was electrified with DC from raw sewage? :P Might be late…
Commas save huge geographical mistakes.
Now they just need to bolt a couple of turbines on to the Capital Building and put all that hot air to use.
http://i.imgur.com/0Oassn0.gif
representation of any clean energy bill before [insert democrat or republican or etc here] gets their hands on it and adds their unrelated personal agenda crap into it and resubmits.
biogas is a cool old tech (somewhere around here have diagrams of local sewage treatment plant – methane digesters in original 60 y old spec)
If ever ’twas a place with more $h17 than they know what to do with… Seems quite appropriate, really.
Anyone else read this, and instantly think “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”???
Washington’s been running on bullshit and hot air for years.
Washington run on ass gas, I like it.
Great project, however very low energy density per ton of waste
Now they’re fracking our asses.
Beats the alternatives!
It’s not about green energy it’s a preparing.
Nothing new. Hyperion Sewage Plant in Los Angeles has been doing this for years.
We have these in the UK and the company says that there earning quite a bit from the plants alone
They’re pretty effective, but there’s unfortunately little energy in sewage. I read a Swedish study that concluded the flushings of 9 million people would power on average about 10,000 gas-powered cars and no more. It’s a rather trivial source of energy.
10 MW sounds like a lot (mega!), but that’s basically about 4000 average UK households, and considering that households are just a fifth of the overall energy demand, that amount of power only actually sustains a small community on the order of 1000 people.
While they are small, they have the additional upshot that they burn the methane from the decay instead of it getting released the normal way, as the co2 produced are much less potent as a green house gas.
Some of the city buses in my town are powered by methane from household food waste. Energy, less methane in the atmosphere and less diesel engine particles in the city center (others are diesel/electric hybrids).
It’s a minuscule part of the “solution”, but worthwhile and a nice one for what it is.
Agreed. Around here, they use bio digestors a lot in farms and the like, where there are enough sources of waste, and running electric cables would be costly or problematic, due to rivers or forests in the way
The thing with methane in the atmosphere however, is that UV light will cause is to react with oxygen (eventually…), so it can’t really be viewed as a greenhouse gas…
When you keep adding it continuously, there’s always an amount of methane up there.
The half-life of methane in the atmosphere is about 10 years, so it sticks around long enough to cause trouble.
Does it make a difference that Congress generates more BS per capita?
Any time you need to generate energy it’s always common to utilize local resources.
Old! I actually thought it was one of those new bacteria plants that turned waste directly to electricity. See http://m.phys.org/news/2013-12-power-bacteriaand-loofahs.html
10 elephants poop a ton a day and pee 500 gallons. If we could just use all of that GOP (gee oh pee), Washington could power the country.
Even we have a cogen at our sewer plant.
The crap in Washing DC runs the whole country.
There has to be a political joke here somewhere.