In Florida, 12 waste-to-energy facilities from Miami to Panama City process nearly 20,000 tons of municipal solid waste each day while continuously producing over 500 megawatts of clean, renewable power. This amount of waste is enough to fill a football stadium, imagine that! The Tampa Bay area is home to four waste-to-energy facilities, located in the City of Tampa and in the counties of Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco. Without these facilities, local governments would be faced with the daunting task of siting large landfills near rapidly growing residential communities. The issue of this development is another problem to be addressed in a different forum but there is no doubt that this landfill to energy idea is a good one.

I first heard about this idea several years ago when a small county northwest of where I reside started pumping landfill gas through pipes and converting it to energy. In fact, I later heard a follow up that claimed the entire city was running on this power alone. Amazing. Not only is this greenie meanie but it’s cheap, too. These waste-to-energy projects eliminate 90% of the waste that might have ended up in a landfill. But it isn’t nearly enough, as you can imagine, because landfills throughout the state are reaching capacity faster than anticipated. It is becoming increasingly difficult to expand landfills or open new ones as residential development encroaches on once-remote landfill sites. People are already living in homes where they can smell garbage 24/7 in various lower income areas around the state. Florida’s current population of over 17 million is expected to reach almost 23 million by the year 2020, bringing even more challenges to managing municipal solid waste.

Because of the high population numbers and the lack of remaining land space, this waste to energy concept is a good one for Florida. Beleive it or not, hydropower and windpower have proven to be a bust in the sunshine state because coastal winds are never steady but come and go in big bursts followed by long periods of utter stillness. Hydropower is being used in nuclear energy facilities already but I suspect the moneymakers see the use of water as energy to be a loss here, especially in the face of water shortages. They are too busy signing over leases to companies like Aquafina who suck out the aquifer at an astounding rate while we are being told not to water the lawn. This is unfortunate but true. And solar power, as sunshine-y as we are, is way too expensive an upgrade to add to rental homes, timeshares and winter condos, which is what most of the population resides in. So the landfill becomes the cheapest and wisest prospect for all concerned.

It is in the spirit of this development, that Global Energy Systems has signed an agreement with Charlotte County, Florida for the development of a landfill gas sequestration and energy facility at the Charlotte County Zemel Road landfill. This landfill, like all landfills, generates methane, a natural gas, created from the decomposition of its waste. Methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas that is actually 23 times more potent that carbon dioxide. Typically, as a control, this methane gas is flared to keep it from escaping into the atmosphere. This is why you hear about landfills being “burned”. In this new technology, landfill gas sequestration (which is a fancy word for “trapping”), Global Energy will construct and operate a landfill gas collection system and onsite energy plant for local electricity production. As I said earlier, something similar to this was first instituted by a small city northwest of me.

Global Energy Systems has purchased all the rights for the landfill gas generated at the Charlotte County, Florida Zemel Road landfill and has the exclusive right to construct and operate a landfill gas to electricity project at that location. Global Energy Systems expects to make a $6,000,000 investment at the landfill for infrastructure and power generation equipment. And this big price tag is exactly why this sort of thing takes big business to get involved, however distasteful that may be to most environmentalists and activists.

According to Charlie Wall, the COO at Global Energy, “The landfill will provide enough gas to generate enough electricity to power 1,500 homes in Charlotte County every year. This proactive approach to carbon dioxide emissions reductions has the equivalent benefit of removing 17,000 vehicles from our roadways.” Now, that is pretty amazing and looks promising to me. Another good thing is that, based on its greenhouse gas emissions, the Zemel Road landfill has not reached a critical level and, therefore, does not require mandatory gas collection. That critical level was established by the EPA “New Source Performance Standards (NSPS), which limits the level of pollution that a single, stationary source may produce.

As well, it is said by a project manager at Charlotte County, that the project will generate as much as 1 million dollars in annual revenues for the county. In this economy, I am sure the county managers there are drooling. And so they should be. This is a win win situation for all concerned and is an idea that should be taken on by most cities, both large and small, across the country.

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