Leftovers from San Francisco Bay Area restaurants may soon help power the region.
The East Bay Municipal Utility District has created a program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, to generate electricity from the methane gas produced by food decomposition.
Engineers have been testing and refining the process since the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the utility $50,000 in 2006 to study it, and they plan to sell energy to the grid beginning next year.
"The program could yield a significant amount of energy, long-term," said John Hake, an associate civil engineer with the utility district. "It's no silver bullet, but it could be one part of a portfolio of renewable energy sources."
Food scraps are collected from about 2,300 restaurants and grocery stores in the Bay Area and taken to the utility district's wastewater treatment plant in Oakland, where they are pumped into large tanks full of microbes that ...