Cow Poo Powers California’s Grid

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Cows crap a lot. As of today, BioEnergy Solutions of California’s Central Valley is using a vat of liquid cow poo the size of five football fields and 33 feet deep to produce natural gas. Planet Ark reports that David Albers, lifelong dairyman, aims to provide natural gas to power 1,200 homes a day through his Vintage Dairy Biogas Project. Albers is a partner in the 5,000-head Vintage Dairy and president of BioEnergy Solutions, which funded and built the facility at a cost of millions of dollars. The natural gas he’s collecting is now plugged into California’s grid via the Pacific Gas & Electric Company, part of an agreement to deliver up to three billion cubic feet of renewable natural gas a year—enough to meet the electricity needs of approximately 50,000 PG&E residential customers.

Good job. Even better: human poo power. Shiteloads of that to go around.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones’ environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.