Forget about doggie bags. Several of San Francisco's finest restaurants will be turning table scraps into electricity with technology from the University of California, Davis. Using an anaerobic phased solids digester, the Biogas Energy Project will process eight tons of organic matter a week into energy. Each ton can produce enough electricity to power 10 average California homes for a day.

While many wastewater treatment plants and livestock farms use similar systems, the bacteria in UC Davis' system can process a wider variety of waste, including food scraps, animal manure, and rice straw. It also works in about half the time of other digesters. And, it produces both hydrogen and methane, which can be burned to produce electricity and heat.

UC Davis has teamed with Onsite Power Systems to sell similar production facilities to waste-generating businesses such as food processors, farms, and municipal green-waste collection agencies. Onsite will scale the digester to fit the customer's property, take the waste stream, and send back the energy. This process reduces greenhouse gasses as well as the amount of garbage going into already crowded landfills.

See Associated Figure

Reprints

Printer-Friendly

Email this Article

RSS

Submit PlanetEE del.icio.us Digg Reddit Newsvine StumbleUpon Netscape Yahoo MyWeb Live Bookmarks Fark  Submit

Font Size

What's This?

1W LED Brightens Solid-State Lighting Designs Development Kit Promises High Quality Headsets And Bluetooth Speakers Diode Arrays Carry DSCC Qualification Eight-Bit MCUs Address Green Issues Data Terminal Eases Mobile Management MLCCs Stand Up To ESD

C Tools Accelerate HDV Development On Xilinx FPGAs A New Design Inflection Point Forecasting Industry Growth For 2009 And Beyond EDA Retools To Exploit Multicore Architectures Design And Verification Move Up In Abstraction EDA Retools To Exploit Multicore Architectures A New Design Inflection Point Design And Verification Move Up In Abstraction

1) Transportation Guidelines For Lithium Batteries Get Updated (1168 views today) 2) Build A Smart Battery Charger Using A Single-Transistor Circuit (261 views today) 3) WHITE PAPER: Liquid-Level Monitoring Using a Pressure Sensor (196 views today) 4) 1-A Switching Regulators Operate With 96% Efficiency To Replace Linear Regulators (128 views today) 5) The Field Of Energy Harvesting Begins To Ripen (109 views today) ALL TOP 20

Reader Comments Nothing new under the sun: http://www.kompogas.ch/en/ For many reasons, making natural gas out of waste materials is a better idea than bending over backwards to make Ethanol or Diesel fuel out of purpose grown organic materials. Natural gas may not run in a unmodified car engine, but CNG or dual fuel vehicles do exist. Pascal Dornier -November 16, 2006
POST YOUR COMMENTS HERE Name: Email:
Your Comments: Enter the text from the image below Please refresh the page if you have trouble reading this text.