DWP Project Turns Trash to Electricity

The Lopez Canyon Landfill used to be an old-fashioned environmental nuisance--home to trash trucks, rats and an unpleasant smell.

Today, the closed northeast Valley dump is the site or one of Los Angeles’ most closely watched green energy projects: a Department of Water and Power initiative to convert gas given off by rotting garbage into electricity using low-emission jet engines known as microturbines.

When the project goes online in early August, its 50 engines will send enough energy into the local grid to power about 1,500 homes, a tiny fraction of the DWP service area. But by using gas that would otherwise be flared off into the atmosphere, the turbines will also take a total of 10,000 pounds of nitrogen oxide--or 500 cars’ worth of pollution--out of the air each year.

Tim Carmichael, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Clean Air, said the project is a drop in the bucket, and no panacea for smog. But numerous tiny efforts like this can make a difference in air quality, he said.

“One site of microturbines feeding off of one landfill is not going to change the world,” Carmichael said. “But is this a model to be copied again and again? I think so.”

The $3-million project originated from the power crisis and was an environmental trade-off, of sorts, for Angelenos.

Funding comes from an agreement between DWP and the state Air Quality Management District in which DWP is spending $14 million on clean air projects in exchange for being allowed to exceed state air pollution limits last summer.

The utility had been cranking out extra electricity for other energy-starved California markets. The department never exceeded the air pollution limits, but the deal remains in place, said Angelina Galiteva, DWP’s strategic planning director.

Now, she added, the DWP is considering expanding the Lopez Canyon project to 11 landfills across Los Angeles, which give off enough methane to run an estimated 1,000 microturbines. Some of the machines would also burn pure natural gas, and all would produce precious electricity from refuse while improving air quality.

“These are some of the nastiest kinds of greenhouse gases there is,” DWP Green Power manager John Giese said. “We’re sitting on a lot of landfill methane that’s not being used to generate electricity, and we’re looking for new ways to do that.”

Microturbine technology, which became commercially available in the last three years, has attracted serious attention since the onset of California’s energy crisis.

Cheap, portable and about the size of a kitchen refrigerator, the engines will be most important for their role in the newly popular concept of “distributive generation,” in which small power sources take some strain off the state grid, said Scott Tomashefsky, advisor to the California Energy Commission.

Until this summer, most microturbines were used by businesses and buildings, which fire them up during peak hours to cut costs, Tomashefsky said.

But last Monday, Burbank became the first municipality to use microturbines at a dump, plugging in 10 of them at its Verdugo Mountains Landfill, city officials said.

From 1986 to 1993, Burbank had used a dirtier internal combustion engine to convert its methane. Officials took it offline because it was too expensive and unreliable, said spokeswoman Jeannette Meyer.

The Lopez Canyon project will work in conjunction with a more powerful internal combustion engine that has been around for years, Giese said.

Some longtime residents who fought the city-owned dump until it closed in 1996 are welcoming the project as another small improvement for the 400-acre property, which sanitation officials would like to see blend in with the dramatic foothills that surround it.

“As far as I’m concerned, that’s still a crummy site. The only thing up there is that flare station,” said Lake View Terrace resident Phyllis Hines. “But this is inoffensive in size. [And] if it’s going to help our energy crisis, swell.”

The DWP has bought 66 other microturbines that will be installed at hospitals, museums and universities under the agreement with the state. The microturbines were purchased from Capstone Turbine Corp. of Chatsworth.

But the landfill project is the real showcase, Galiteva said. The energy produced by the turbines will eventually make back the equipment cost. And when the landfill runs out of gas in about 10 years, the turbines can be packed up and used elsewhere, Giese said.

“Even without the environmental benefit, this will have paid for itself, and we will have learned something,” Giese said.