OAKLAND — Leftovers from San Francisco Bay Area restaurants may
soon help power the region. The East Bay Municipal Utility
District has created a program, believed to be the first of its
kind in the nation, to generate electricity from the methane gas
produced by food decomposition. Engineers have been testing and
refining the process since the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency gave the utility $50,000 in 2006 to study it, and they
plan to sell energy to the grid beginning next year. "The
program could yield a significant amount of energy, long-term,"
said John Hake, an associate civil engineer with the utility
district. "It's no silver bullet, but it could be one part of a
portfolio of renewable energy sources." Food scraps are
collected from about 2,300 restaurants and grocery stores in the
Bay Area and taken to the utility district's wastewater
treatment plant in Oakland, where they are pumped into large
tanks full of microbes that speed up decomposition. The food
releases methane gas, which is used to