[We interrupt the ongoing Hillary/Bernie pie fight for this important message]:
Remember the “Ah, The Power of Cheese” commercials a while back?
Ah, The Power of Cheese!
But Wallace and Grommit are right! It might sound like one of Wallace’s Rube Goldberg-ish inventions but electricity from cheese (yes, you read that correctly: electricity from cheese!) is a real, happenin’ thing, even if you think it’s cheesy. According to a story in The Independent (as reported in Think Progress),
“In the French Alps, a cheese-based power station is producing enough electricity to supply a community of 1,500 inhabitants.”
How can this be? Are there holes in this cheese…um…story?
Where there’s a will, there’s a whey. The community of Albertville in the southeast part of France, famous for its production of Beaufort (“one of France’s flagship food features”), is using the whey that is skimmed from Beaufort production to create a biogas mixture of methane and CO2. The result is electricity and warm water. The plant, dubbed Savoie Lactée (trans: Milky Whey…!) opened in October and generates as much—or maybe whey more—electricity as it consumes.
Indeed, behold the power of cheese!
The process starts with Little Miss Muffet and her curds and whey, one of the the first steps in making cheese. The curds are the solids used for the cheesemaking; the liquid whey, released from the curds, is a byproduct often considered waste. Every pound of cheese yields about a gallon of whey but apparently whey is not easy to dispose of due to high concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen. Dumped into streams, it can create algae blooms. It can be spread as fertilizer but regulations often limit the amount farmers can apply to their crops.
At Albertville, bacteria is added to the whey which uses the bacteria as food. The bacteria digests the sugars in the whey, releasing biogas: methane. The methane is then used to heat water to 90° C (194°) which in turn powers generators to produce the electricity, up to 3,000,000 KWh annually, much of which is sold to French energy company, EDF.
Most organic material can be turned into biogas by bacteria, but advantage here is speed: the whey can be converted in about four days whereas other materials can take up to 40 days to be converted.
The biogas isn’t the only byproduct put to use at Albertville. Cream leftover from the Beaufort production is turned into ricotta cheese and butter. Protein powders can be made that are fed to livestock with no known ill effects. But neither cream, ricotta, protein powder nor butter can be turned into electricity. Whey, on the other hand, is just a bit of bacteria away from powering your compact fluorescent light bulbs.
This isn’t just happening in France. Small producers in Wisconsin, Quebec and elsewhere have begun turning cheese juice into power juice. Even small producers can generate enough energy to satisfy their own needs and have enough left over to power “five to ten houses.” This can be compounded when the surplus whey is mixed with other organic materials such as food waste and brewery waste. (Energy from beer! YES!)
So, if you are a cheese lover like me, eat more cheese! Some day, cheese might be the power source for your Nissan Leaf.
You might even be able to go to a muenster truck rally…
Behold the power of cheese!
