Biogas Powers at Ohio State University

Waste is not going to waste at Ohio State University’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center.

 The center’s Wooster campus is using agricultural and food-processing wastes to generate nearly one-third of the electricity needs on campus.

The 3.6 megawatt-hours of energy produced is enough to power 313 average U.S. homes. The university says the center is using anaerobic digestion technology, which turns a variety of organic wastes into biogas that is then converted to electricity.

The energy is produced by quasar energy group, a Cleveland-based company that built an anaerobic digester in 2010 at the center’s BioHio Research Park. The 550,000-gallon digester can process 30,000 wet tons of biomass annually.