Poop Power Can Be Electric 6 Practical Uses For Animal Waste
October 21, 2011 – 7:08 amPoop can be a powerful thing, and we’re not just talking smell.
Pretty soon it could be lighting South Florida houses, powering televisions and keeping air conditioners humming.
A Pompano Beach start-up, Power Green Energy, wants to take the sludge churned out at municipal wastewater treatment plants and generate electricity to sell to Florida Power Light Co.
It’s the latest twist in a larger push to create alternative, renewable energy sources. FPL has installed acres of solar power arrays in three counties. A Missouri company has proposed a windfarm of 50-story turbines covering a wide swath of sugar-cane land near Belle Glade. And Palm Beach and Broward County solid waste plants for years have burned garbage to produce energy.
After turning toward the sun, the wind and the garbage pail, it was only a matter of time before people started looking down the toilet.
“This is the way you can handle something that’s a big nasty right now,” says Roy Rogers , a consultant for Power Green Energy with IBI Group Inc. “Just think of that. The input is human waste and the output is energy.”
The company has received tentative approval from the City Commission to set up operations on Powerline Road, between Copans Road and Atlantic Boulevard, and it hopes to plug into nearby FPL powerlines by the middle of next year. The commission will take a final vote on the company’s rezoning request Tuesday.
Power Green Energy’s initial goal is to produce 4 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a thousand or more homes.
It’s not just electricity that will be produced, but high-grade agricultural products that can be used as fertilizer.
The company isn’t alone in seeing the energy potential in sewage sludge. Palm Beach and Broward counties have plans to use their sludge to produce energy at their wastewater treatment plants. The electricity won’t be sold to FPL, but will be used to reduce electric costs at the plants themselves.
The Southern Region Water Reclamation Facility west of Boynton Beach will break ground on its $2.4 million project in October, while a more ambitious $18.6 million project is being planned at the Broward County North Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant in Pompano Beach.
Similar technology is being used to turn waste into energy on hog farms in North Carolina and to turn cow manure into electricity in Wisconsin.
“This is taking a negative and turning it into a positive for our environment,” says Amie Silverman, a co-owner of Power Green Energy.
The proposed plant could also cut down on fossil fuel emissions. Many Broward County wastewater plants hire haulers to truck their sludge for agricultural uses to distant locations like Clewiston and St. Lucie County .
The hauling distance would be far less to the urban Pompano Beach site. Also, Rogers said, it’s the company’s goal to find uses in Broward County for the agricultural products it creates, to eliminate the distant trucking completely.
In Palm Beach County , a number of the wastewater plants – including the county’s, Boca Raton ‘s and the regional plant serving Delray Beach and Boynton Beach – only have to haul their sludge to Solid Waste Authority facilities in West Palm Beach. There, it is heated in a tumbling container using methane released from the county’s nearby landfill to produce pellets that can be used to make fertilizer.
Under Power Green Energy’s plan, the sludge would be transported in covered, open-bed trucks to its waste-to-energy site. The material would be placed into airless structures, called anaerobic digesters, where it is mixed with enzymes, bacteria and other organisms. Then, Rogers said, it would be tumbled and heated to produce methane gas that will fuel engines to power generators that produce electricity.
“It’s like a slow cooker, a crock pot,” Rogers said. “The concept is not new. The engineering is state-of-the-art.”
Many of the wastewater treatment plants in Broward and Palm Beach counties use similar digesters to process their sludge, but they burn off the methane because they don’t have the engines and generators to turn it into electricity.
“We have investigated a couple of different proposals from a couple of different companies, based on trying to capture the waste gas from our treatment process,” said Chuck Flynn, superintendent of Plantation ‘s wastewater treatment plant. None has turned out to be economically feasible, Flynn said.
The methane-producing systems don’t produce large amounts of electricity, said Paul Greene, chairman of the American Biogas Council, a trade association formed two years ago because of growing interest in the technology.
“A large digester is equivalent to a tiny windfarm in terms of its power,” Greene said. “A struggle we have in promoting the energy is the size of it.”
But unlike windfarms, that need wind to work, or solar power, that stops producing at night, the anaerobic digesters can produce energy 24 hours a day, Greene said.
And there’s always someone needing to flush.
lbarszewski@tribune.com or 954-356-4556
Tags: florida houses