Waste to Energy Battle

By Keith Heyde

 

In the world of energy, there are many moral questions. Are the health and hazard risks of nuclear worth the energy production? Is the pursuit of finite resource consumption viable? And where the heck am I going to get my electricity if not?

It seems as if the game is a constant tug of war between what is morally acceptable and what is necessary to preserve the status quo.

Yet, for some reason people have been hesitant to fully broach the concept of waste to energy recovery. It seems as if people are disgusted by the fact that human trash and excrement could be used to generate electricity. Whether it is the methane rising from a landfill or bacteria processing sewage into hydrogen, people just DO NOT like the thought of powering their house from trash.

That is to say, people in general do not like the thought…

There is a rather large, and highly important demographic of the worlds developed infrastructure that LOVES the prospect of generating electricity from waste. These are the wastewater treatment companies of the world, the corporations and municipalities that handle waste on a daily basis.

Imagine, every day for these companies they are given an oncoming stream of material that they have to put energy into. The energy goes into processing, treating, and disinfecting the waste or sewage so that it can be reusable in the future. However, it is not as if they are getting paid a significant amount to ‘clean’ the water, it is more a matter of necessity. Yet, necessity or not, the wastewater plants are still accountable to purchase and pay for their own electricity. So, it is as if they are constantly incurring debt to treat the water that we need. It winds up that the tax payers (in most situations) pay this debt so that the water around them can be suitably cleaned.

Because wastewater treatment is such a costly utility, it means that in many poorer communities, especially in the developing world, wastewater treatment is ignored, leading to contamination and spread of diseases such as cholera.

However, waste to energy technology looks to be providing a means to break the cycle of wastewater draw. Microbial based technology that first treats the sewage and then leads to the production of energy could provide the means to become energy independent for waste water plants.

What does this mean? Having an energy independent wastewater plant would allow for us to process the sewage humans create without having to draw in any additional resources. This means that areas that are incredibly burdened for water, such as L.A. would have the capacity to process their own water, without any additional burden to the energy grid.

Furthermore, it opens the door for energy deprived areas in the developing world to treat their own wastewater without necessarily building an entire electric grid.

Now, I do not mean to get state that the waste to energy technology of today can accomplish this feat. However, recent advancements in microbial waste to energy facilities in California have posted energy recovery of up to 15%... which is up from around 2% last year.

These savings are huge and it is all being processed by more efficient machines and bacteria.  

Although the energy community relies upon moral skepticism, it also is fundamentally linked to optimism as well. How long has fusion been 10 years away? A rather long time…

With that said, perhaps full waste to energy recovery is easily feasible within the near future.

We shall see.