Unlike most things at the track, this...

Unlike most things at the track, this little adventure has no losers.

Everybody wins.

Hollywood Park cuts down on the $1.5 million it paid last year to clean out its stables.

Western Power Group Inc. gets 30,000 tons a year in free fuel.

Area landfills are relieved of thousands of tons of garbage.

Southern California Edison receives a bonus 15 megawatts of electricity a year, enough to power 10,000 households.

All of that from 100 tons of stable waste generated daily by the nearly 2,000 horses that pack the barns at Hollywood Park.

Joe Robinson, the track’s assistant general manager and plant superintendent, said Hollywood Park used to pay to have the horse manure and the straw it falls on shipped to landfills. But this summer, Hollywood Park joined with Western Power Group of Newport Beach to send the bedding straw to a $34.5 million waste-to-energy plant outside El Centro near the California-Mexico line.

In what is a daily ritual at Hollywood Park, trucks pick up the manure-and-straw mixture in the barns and dump it on a conveyor belt, which moves it through an industrial-size compactor and a baler.

Hollywood Park workers then haul the bales, which weigh between 12,000 and 18,000 pounds each--depending on the moisture content--on flatbed trucks nearly 200 miles to the 10-story Imperial Resource Recovery Plant 10 miles northeast of El Centro.

There the bales are ground up into three-inch particles and burned in a giant furnace--known in industry jargon as a “traveling grate spreader stoker boiler”--along with wood, cattle manure and straw, at a rate of 20 tons an hour.

Each year, the plant will burn 32,000 tons of wood waste, 25,000 tons of cattle manure and 105,000 tons of agricultural waste, which includes the ripe straw from Hollywood Park.

The cost savings, energy gains and environmental benefits have all parties in the arrangement pleased.

Even the smell down in El Centro isn’t a problem.

Gaspar Torres, director of the Air Pollution Control District in Imperial County, said the plant sometimes smells “like a typical manure pile” but the odor does not reach the nearest residences half a mile away.