Posted on 10/08/2015 9:36:01 AM PDT by The Looking Spoon
From the Washington Post:
The next time you flush in the nation’s capital, you might consider this: You — or, more precisely, whatever you have flushed — will help generate clean energy.It's actually a pretty interesting system, which you can see here.D.C. Water, which also treats sewage from much of the Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs, recently became the first utility in North America to use a Norwegian thermal hydrolysis system to convert the sludge left over from treated sewage into electricity.
Yes, to put it bluntly, the city’s sewage treatment plant is turning poop into power.
I'm reminded of the movie Monsters Inc., where this universe of monsters derives their power from batteries that store energy generated from the screams of young children. Some monsters in this world are professional "scarers" who try to elicit those screams. By the movie's end (SPOILER ALERT, but it's a 14 year old movie, so if you haven't seen it by now...) it's realized that the laughter of the kids provided WAY more energy, and so the monsters shift from away from scaring to the much more efficient method of comedy.
The point being, DC spent all this time and effort on building a plant that collects sewage when they already had one a facility that provides more "supply" than all of the toilets in America put together...
All we have to do is "rename" it, "Crapitol Hill." (The quotes are meant to indicate that doing so would merely be a formality.)
“a huge waste...”
Nice pun there.
Is Mel Gibson underground shoveling pig poop?
When I was stationed in Bolling AFB, DC, the smell from Blue Plains was just... Epic.
Hated a southerly wind.
Its not unheard of to extract the methane and use it to drive generators.
Glad to know someone caught that.
Oh, I totally realize/know that. I was trying to make a sarcastic point :-)
It’s better than turning power into poop.
I’ve been in the Blue Plains plant - used to supply control equipment to them. Not a place to be on a hot day.
No $#!|.
Best headline ever!
hmmm....in D.C.?
Could be a perpetual motion breakthrough!
“It’s better than turning power into poop.”
yeah, that would be solar. :)
I still drive by Blue Plains several times a week, and the stink hasn’t gotten any sweeter.
Sounds like most of the policies that come out of D.C.
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