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Pushing to buy at least 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, Palo Alto has turned to a new supply: rotting garbage in Watsonville.
The city utilities department has inked a deal to buy ``green'' electricity created by the methane gas that seeps out of the buried, decomposing garbage in the Santa Cruz County landfill.
'I think it reflects what our community wants, what our council has directed us to do,'' said Girish Balachandran, an assistant manager of the utilities department.
Palo Alto will buy enough of the landfill electricity to power about 1,500 homes. That will slightly reduce the air pollution from traditional power plants and lessen dependence on non-renewable resources such as oil and natural gas, according to city officials.
Flammable methane percolates up through the ground in landfills across the country. In the first season of concerts at Shoreline Amphitheater, built in 1986 on an old landfill in Mountain View, gas often filtered through the lawn, smelling nasty and occasionally catching fire before the problem was fixed.
Gas
Originally posted by otlg27
Well in a strange way, you would expect Silicon Valley to lead the way, seeing as they *are* the high-tech capital of the world
Osiris