Can the power grid run on garbage, safely and effectively?
. The process isn’t even very efficient, extracting just a fraction of the refuse’s potential power. “A lot of energy escapes in the process,” says Johan Enslin, executive director of the Energy Systems Program at Clemson University.
Our heaps of castoffs mean we’ve got that same gas topside too. Deprived of oxygen in landfills and manure ponds, modern waste breaks down into methane more or less the same way as the ancient subterranean stuff. There’s plenty of incentive to trap that gas: Methane is more than There are a couple of different methods for turning that junk into voltage. The oldest involves a vessel called an anaerobic digester: Organic matter goes into an oxygen-deprived tank, where it breaks down over the course of days or months. The resulting gas is often used to power internal combustion engines or turbines that produce electricity and heat. Biogas can also generate voltage through fuel cells, which tap a chemical reaction to separate hydrogen atoms into electrons and protons.
Farms and wastewater treatment facilities could hold the key to boosting American usage. At present, just 20 dairies and livestock operations around the country turn their dung into power, which nets only around 173 million kilowatt hours—scarcely enough to keep the country alight for 30 minutes. But the EPA estimates there are more than 8,000 farms across the US that could plausibly recover biogas. That would rake in another 16 billion kilowatt hours of energy each year.
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