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Good Good Good | SEP 7, 2023 | Green Energy | Shield Insurance Agency Blog

Converting sewage into heat and electricity offers a compelling proposition: more waste equals more green energy and clean power.

In the summer of 2020, as wildfires burned across more than a million acres in Oregon, workers at Clackamas County’s water treatment facility started calling each other.

From their homes, they could see that the towers of flames were closing in on the wastewater treatment plant. Power was failing all over the state.

If the facility lost power, it could flood the Willamette River with untreated waste, causing untold environmental damage.

In the end, the facility remained powered up and the Willamette was spared. But with wildfires and extreme weather increasingly common, the incident underscored how generating and storing renewable power on-site could build resiliency into the system.

“It’s extremely energy-consumptive to treat wastewater,” says Dave Moldal, program manager at Energy Trust of Oregon.

As the region grows in population, the more energy the wastewater plant requires. But what if increasing volumes of wastewater could provide the treatment plant with more energy rather than consume it? That’s exactly what’s been happening at Clackamas County’s Tri-City Water Resource Recovery Facility for the past seven months.

Since August 2021, the plant has been pumping out renewable power produced from methane, a natural byproduct of human waste decomposing in an oxygen-free environment.

Now, this loop of green energy represents a powerful example of how waste can become something we benefit from rather than expend resources disposing of.

By turning human waste into power, wastewater treatment facilities have the potential to become energy generators instead of consumers, while creating clean water that’s returned to the local ecosystem.

When wastewater arrives at Clackamas Water Environment Services’ treatment plant, it contains pretty much what you’d expect — human waste, paper, food, soap, sand — plus a random assortment of items that people accidentally flush or drop into drains, like a miniature Stormtrooper helmet, a Pee-wee Herman doll, and a rubber elephant, all of which are proudly on display at the facility.

However, the individuals who work here don’t consider this to be a mere waste treatment facility. Instead, they see it as a place where clean water and fertilizer for non-food crops is produced. And now, they’ve added a third item to the list of beneficial resources they churn out: green energy.

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