5 Weird Ways To Generate Renewable Energy
As concern grows for the climate and all eyes are on fossil fuels, the hunt is on for new ways of generating electricity. Traditional renewable energy sources have until now focused on harnessing the power of the sun or the wind or water. But traditions are meant to be broken--and that happens more often than you might think
#1 Trash
There is an abundance of trash in the world, and after all, you don’t need it for anything else anyway. So, as feedstocks go, it ticks all the right boxes: plentiful and free. In fact, plentiful is a bit of an understatement. Each year, every American generates 1,609 pounds of trash. Globally, the World Bank estimates that 2.01 billion metric tons (4.4 trillion pounds) of trash are produced each year. Australia, for one, has so much trash that its landfills will soon be overflowing, with Australians pitching 21 million tons of waste into landfills each year.
The land down under is taking a new approach to their trash problem by turning their trash into electricity. That’s a win-win from both a trash-reduction aspect and an electricity-generation aspect. The project--a joint venture between UEA-based Masdar and Tribe Infrastructure Group, will produce 29 megawatts of baseload renewable energy, according to Forbes. With this process. This will be enough to power 36,000 homes and displace 300,000 tons of CO2 emissions each year. The process of converting trash to energy is cost-intensive, though, but it’s better than having the trash pile into a landfill. Construction on the project is already in full swing, with a projected completion date of 2022.
#2 Onion Juice
It’s true: onions really can produce electricity, and we’re not just talking about in an lab or that school science project. The process of taking onion juice, through the Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS), is an anaerobic digester that turns the feedstock into biogas. This biogas is then turned into methane, which is the main component of natural gas.
2.
Shell’s new solar farm to help power a natural gas plant in Australia
Shell Australia is set to construct and operate a solar farm made up of around 400,000 photovoltaic panels in the state of Queensland.
In an announcement Friday, Shell Australia described the facility as its “first large-scale solar farm” and said it would have a capacity of 120 megawatts.
Work on the project is set to finish in 2021, with Shell Australia saying up to 200 new jobs will be created during the construction phase.
Queensland was chosen as the project’s location because it had “some of the most reliable sunshine in the world”, the company added. The solar farm will help to power operations at the QGC onshore natural gas project and cut carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 300,000 tonnes a year.
“We believe solar will play an increasing role in the global energy system, especially when partnered with a reliable energy source such as gas,” Tony Nunan, the chairman of Shell Australia, said in a statement.
3.
HOW A UTILITY’S COUNTERINTUITIVE STRATEGY MIGHT FUEL A GREENER FUTURE
Patti Poppe, the head of a Michigan utility that serves 6.7 million people, wanted to get greener, faster. Four years ago, Consumers Energy relied on power plants that burn fossil fuels for 74% of its electricity—until staff realized the utility could nearly eliminate its dependence on coal and natural gas, thanks to the plunging costs of renewable energy.
Consumers has since stopped adding fossil fuels to the grid. It has retired seven of its coal-fired power plants and, by 2040, plans to retire the remaining five. Instead, Consumers will generate more electricity from solar and wind farms, large-scale battery storage and other technologies. Several of its solar projects are due to come online in 2022; a competitive bidding process is underway. Consumers is also working to help customers manage and reduce their electricity consumption with connected devices such as smart thermostats and smart meters, which enable remote tracking and management of energy consumption. It’s a big shift for a 134-year-old utility that finished rolling out smart meters only two years ago and, until then, performed meter checks in person.
“We were walking through people’s backyards to figure out how much energy they were using a month,” says Ms. Poppe, also the CEO of Consumers parent CMS Energy. “Technology has evolved to the point where we can optimize energy usage for the first time.”
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