Late last year, Diageo announced plans to build a bio-energy power plant hard by Scotland’s Firth of Forth in Fife (say that five times fast). The plant will be fueled by the organic waste yielded by Diageo’s Cameron Bridge distillery and should supply the supermajority of the steam and electrical power needed to operate the plant. This is practically perpetual motion (not really, but fun to say). Diageo produces a dizzying array of “adult beverages” including 46 different blended and single malt whiskies; Guinness, Red Stripe and Windhoek (my favorite Namibian lager) beers; Dom Pérignon; Gilbey’s, Gordon’s and Tanqueray Gins; Captain Morgan Rum; Romana Sambuca; Smirnoff vodkas; José Cuervo tequilas and all kinds of other good stuff to drink. Clearly, with all this boozing, these guys produce a lot of waste that could be converted to energy and it will be interesting to see if this first Scottish experiment spreads across their empire.
Today, an outfit called E-Fuel announced a deal with my favorite pale ale producer, Sierra Nevada Brewing, to install a bunch of their EFuel100 MicroFueler machines in SNB’s Chico, CA brewery (the location where I consumed first glass of their legendary Big Foot Ale). The machines will be fed all the dead yeast and other gunk found at the bottom of the fermentation tanks after each batch of beer is drained off to be bottled and in turn the MicroFueler’s will make ethanol out of that waste. Fill a MicroFueler with 200 gallons of goop and get about 35 gallons of ethanol a week later. The machines do require 110V / 20A power supply and water to produce the ethanol and CO2, so it would be interesting to understand their true efficiency. Brewer’s yeast isn’t just for breakfast anymore, I guess. Not sure what SNB is going to do with all the ethanol they make, but it would be cool to roll into the pub attached to the brewery with your 64 oz beer growler and get a little ethanol to go. It seems E-Fuel will sell you(!) one of these machines for about $10k ($7k after various federal tax credits) and their website promotes the idea of just pumping the ethanol right into your vehicle’s gas tank. Unless you have an E85 flex fuel vehicle, not sure it would be a good idea to try to mix in ethanol on your own, but it’s a cool idea to have one of these sitting next to the house. Although they are bright green and I’m not sure my HOA would go for it.
So we’ve pretty much covered green ways to deal with the production waste of two of my favorite things, whiskie and beer. If only there was something for coffee. Besides composting. Or Java Logs (who has a real fireplace these days?). Enter the RITI printer. While just a concept, this home printer uses the wet dregs from your morning brew as the “ink”. Although you can’t plug it into a computer and you have to advance the paper / operate the print stylus by hand (a good notch below dot matrix print quality), it’s an intriguing idea. Some day.
Maybe in the not so distant future, I’ll have an ethanol-powered electrical generator to run my power hungry home office (including a coffee grounds printer), while sipping on Diageo-powered Long Island Ice Tea. Maybe the future isn’t so dark after all. I guess it’s time to write Obama and ask him to toss a few bucks in to the next stimulus package for green drinks initiatives. What could it hurt?
