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Sunday, December 19, 2004

Give Me Turkee

When this country has to start scraping from the bottom of the barrel to provide energy, it will start to look like this. I suppose once you get over the novelty of burning turkey droppings to generate electricity, the banality of the numbers sets in. The investors give this data out:
  1. 700,000 tons of dung per year
  2. 55 megawatts power generated
  3. 55,000 homes powered
  4. $202 million financing

Placing the data into more human terms, each household would end up burning 70 pounds of dung per day. The energy content of the stuff ends up less than 300 food calories per pound. This sounds really low, but when you consider that the turkey metabolizes much of its feed energy in the first place, its lucky we get anything out of the deal.

The unlucky amongst us get to live downwind from or travel past a turkey processing farm.

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