Bacteria Power: Energy Minute
Hungry bacteria can cut energy bills by thousands of dollars a month.
I’m Jon Greenberg with this energy minute.
Treating wastewater takes a lot of power. But both the City of Nashua and Stonyfield Farm have struck a deal with bacteria to clean up their wastewater at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
They both built massive tanks called digesters. Inside these tanks, water and bacteria mix it up, breaking down solids. Now, the bacteria won’t do their thing if it’s too cold. Fortunately, as they clean the water, they produce a gas. Lisa Drake at Stonyfield says you can use that gas to run heaters under the tank.
DRAKE: So it keeps them nice and warm and keeps them happy and productive and that’s basically how it works.
This approach has already paid for itself at Stonyfield and saves Nashua about a million dollars a year on its electric bills. In Germany, they built a more advanced system that drives a 250 kilowatt power plant. They run the digester, heat buildings and still have juice left over to feed back into the electric grid.
With this energy minute, I’m Jon Greenberg.
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