The power of trash

COVENTRY, Vt.

It seems an odd place to discover part of America's alternative energy future -- a huge dump, buried under massive snow drifts, in Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom.

But deep inside Coventry's vast landfill, decomposing tomatoes, orange peels, and grass clippings are creating powerful gases such as methane.

Pipes vacuum up the gases and feed them into four giant internal-combustion engines that turn a generator, creating electricity that zips out on transmission wires across Vermont's hilly landscape.

This dump provides electricity for 5,000 homes. And it protects the environment as well by reusing the gases rather than releasing them into the air.

"It's turning waste into wealth," Stephen L. Johnson , administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said in an interview in Washington, D.C. "More and more businesses and communities are seeing the opportunity of turning landfill gas into win-win projects."

Around the country, developers and municipalities are transforming their dumps from malodorous eyesores into important sources of cheap energy.

Some 425 dumps -- including 30 in New England -- capture methane gas and use it to produce electricity, a 26 percent increase since 2001. In all, 780,000 homes nationwide receive their power and nearly 1.2 million residences their heat from dumps.

"It's a great system," Avram Patt , general manager of the Washington Electric Cooperative, said on a recent day as he drove up to the landfill. "At the moment, this is the cheapest form of renewable energy."

The EPA expects many more such projects soon; it has identified 560 more landfills that could become energy sources, and it is working with 20 countries, including India and China, on similar projects.

Methane is naturally produced in landfills, coal mines, oil and gas operations, and farms. It accounts for 9 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a potent greenhouse gas, trapping more than 20 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

The landfill gas projects are among several promising solutions to wean the United States from its dependence on foreign oil. They also have the potential to improve the value of dumps, although not all landfills are good candidates for methane plants. Some cannot be retrofitted with pipes or are so small that they don't produce enough gas to justify the economics.

Jenkins Brick Co. of Montgomery, Ala., is believed to be the first major industry to build a factory near a landfill specifically to produce electricity from methane: The gas from the Star Ridge Landfill near Birmingham, Ala., powers a $56 million brick manufacturing plant. In Jackson County, N.C., landfill gas helps produce biodiesel fuel made from rapeseed grown by local farmers -- using an alternative energy source to make an alternative fuel.

Ameresco , a Framingham-based energy services company involved in nearly 20 landfill gas projects, is proposing to use the gas from the Woodland Meadows Landfill in Van Buren Township , Mich., to heat, cool, and provide power for the Detroit Metropolitan Airport . Another of its projects, at a South Carolina landfill, helps power a BMW manufacturing plant.

At the Washington Electric Cooperative, which was formed in 1939, the Coventry dump project was a natural fit with its philosophy of supporting renewable resources.

The cooperative, which serves 10,000 households in rural sections of central and northeastern Vermont, has for the last two decades tried to become greener by buying renewable power and encouraging energy efficiency, said Patt, 56, the general manager.

In 2001 the cooperative's board met to discuss its next steps; its contract with Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which provided a third of its power, ran out the following year. The co-op was already purchasing hydroelectric power produced locally and in Canada as well as energy from nearby plants that burn wood chips.

The co-op decided to buy power from a landfill in New Milford, Conn., but that was available for only four years. So the co-op invested $10 million in its own plant in Coventry at Vermont's largest dump.

At the grand opening of the plant in September 2005, busloads of co-op members came to the festivities, which included speeches from then-US Representative Bernie Sanders and Governor Jim Douglas and even a poem called "Needs" by co-op member Geof Hewitt , who wrote:

"Banana peels! Bananas! Toss organic waste with felicity,

If it makes it to Coventry, it'll come back as electricity!"

Sanders, an Independent representing Vermont in the Senate, is a big fan of the project as well.

"It's beautiful," he said in an interview in Washington. "They are transforming garbage to energy. What an extraordinary thing."

The co-op members also benefit financially. Their electricity rates haven't increased since 2000, and no rate hikes are expected for the next several years.

One afternoon last month, Scott Wilson , manager of the methane gas plant, was busy preparing for an upcoming stretch of subzero temperatures.

Every week, Wilson tunes the gas well heads. In winter, he walks on snowshoes around the dump, taking up to eight hours to adjust 58 well heads.

"If I didn't have the snowshoes, I would sink in over my head," he said. "We have 15-foot drifts out there now."

He didn't seem to mind. "We're taking out greenhouse gases that are super bad and changing them into something," Wilson said. "That's pretty cool."

John Donnelly can be reached at donnelly@globe.com