Landfill Gas

Several weeks ago a group of energy professionals from India were touring central Californian renewable energy projects and I suddenly found myself as the SMUD representative on a tour of the the Kiefer Landfill. I was tasked to provide information on how small generators interconnect with utilities. In exchange, I received a tour of the landfill...and garnered some fantastic information about how landfills extract methane and burn it to provide electricity.


I discovered that the California Air Resources Board will not tolerate the release of methane into the atmosphere. If we don't use it, it will be flared, because to not do so risks explosion. If it isn't captured for a secondary use like power generation, waste gas is always flared and lost:




Kiefer flares the gas if its not burned in ICE engines. I now have a much larger appreciation about my role as a protection engineer responsible for the transmission line from the landfill to SMUD. If the line is out of service, the gas is flared and the power generation is lost.

The reason I'm blogging about all this is because SMUD calls this 'renewable' energy. We market landfill generation as 'green' which is a complete crock of shit. A crock of shit because we universally fail to recognize the vast volumes of cheap Chinese shit that end up in the landfill to begin with, and the massive fossil fuel inputs necessary to keep this over-consumption waste stream moving. This is merely energy efficiency, not renewable energy.

Only dumps on the scale of Merika and her excess consumption are able to generate enough methane to fuel power plants...which is why India is just now sending over engineering delegates...because they are now developing their own massive landfills and see the potential electricity generation.