When GE announced the creation of its Advanced Manufacturing and Software Technology Center outside of Detroit, Michigan last year it was a welcome boost to the state’s hard-hit economy.
But thanks to an innovative partnership, GE technology is about to make the Great Lake State a little greener too by transforming waste by-products into energy.
GE is supplying the engines for the Visteon Woodland Meadows Project, a new renewable energy cogeneration facility that will turn nearby landfill gas – from the Woodland Meadows landfill - into electricity and useable heat.
Woodland Meadows landfill takes in up to 2 million tons of waste from the Detroit area each year.
As that garbage decomposes, it produces methane, most of which is burned off and released into the atmosphere.
“The tragedy is, that’s energy that’s just being wasted,” said Don Spieth, renewables growth leader for GE Power & Water. “We’re always going to have waste, but it’s about finding ways to convert that waste into energy, and we have the technology to do it.”
GE is partnering with Ameresco, an independent energy services company that owns the rights to the landfill gas, to supply four GE Energy Jenbacher engines that will convert the methane into electricity in a new cogeneration facility Ameresco will build on the Visteon site.
The odorless methane will be pumped from the landfill through underground pipes to the facility, which will be owned and operated by Hoosier Energy, an energy cooperative that provides electricity to a network of distributors in the Midwest and has partnered with GE and Ameresco on another landfill gas project in Indiana.
Hoosier will pump the nearly 11 megawatts of electricity generated by the engines — enough to power more than 6,000 homes — onto the local grid in Michigan, while the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions will be equivalent to taking more than 87,000 cars off the road each year.
To see a video of the tech center, click here.
Or, to learn more about this particular project, click here.
SOURCE: GE
Edited by Ian Armitage & Ellie Duncan