Garbage to fuel Pasadena's green power movement

I wanted to emphasize a couple of key paragraphs from my story in today's paper about Pasadena signing a contract to get power from methane gas at an Arizona landfill:

The contract actually would be the smallest of Pasadena's three landfill contracts. The city has one with a company that has two dump sites that generated about 74,000 megawatt hours in 2008. Another one in Santa Clarita is scheduled to begin generating power for the city next year.

By 2011, those landfills are slated to generate nearly twice as much energy as city purchases of wind, solar, and geothermal power combined, according to the staff reports.

Based on the numbers in the staff report it appears that about 12-13 percent of Pasadena's power will come from landfill gases in 2011, with 7 to 8 percent coming from solar, wind, and geothermal.

Funny that in this election year where we have seen campaign promises about solar, wind, clean coal, ethanol, and biodiesel thrown about, nobody has mentioned the wisdom of generating power from garbage. I don't know any national studies about it, but I imagine it could only ever generate the tiniest sliver of our power. Pasadena, I believe, is benefiting from being ahead of the curve on this kind of project- if every utility tried to get landfill power, I am sure there would be much less to go around.

But it certainly is a good philosophy to make use of noxious gases that would otherwise just go straight up into the atmosphere and smell terrible.