Shit Power

Now here’s a renewable energy source. From the BBC:

“Britain’s first dung-fired power station... the pioneering £7.7m complex, at Holsworthy, north Devon, has won the UK Euro Solar award for 2002 for its builders, German-based Farmatic UK.

The plant runs on around 1.6m tons of slurry collected each year from 30 local farmers. At full capacity, it will produce around 1.4 megawatts of power.... Slurry is fermented in two digesters and produces methane gas to power turbines to produce electricity. The plant’s processes also produce hot water for domestic use....

Dung-fuelled power stations are popular in both Germany and Denmark, with about 20-large scale plants operating in each country.”

A quick Web search turned up bio-gas initiatives in Oregon, Kobe, West Bengal, Tanzania, Nepal, and Minnesota. I couldn’t find much about bio-gas power in an urban environment, but just imagine the raw material available every day from, say... Manhattan?

You may also remember bio-gas in a post-petroleum world from such films as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1995.

BBC article found via Boing Boing.