PG&E: The "E" Stands for Excre … Never Mind.

The future of renewable energy is anaerobic manure digestion? That statement sounds like a bunch of BS (sorry, had to), but according to utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG) and BioEnergy Solutions, it’s anything but.

Soon California will be lighting and heating its homes with power derived from cow dung. Yesterday PG&E and BioEnergy Solutions announced the Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, which will see BioEnergy Solutions passing gas (again, sorry) generated at its manure-to-gas facility (see photo above) in Fresno, Calif., to PG&E’s power plants.

The companies hope the effort will produce enough cow dung biogas to power 1,200 homes a day. That may sound like a cow-pie-in-the-sky aspiration (enough already, I know, I know), but BioEnergy Solutions founder David Albers thinks it’s a reasonable goal. “When most people see a pile of manure, they see a pile of manure,” he said. “We saw it as an opportunity for farmers, for utilities and for California.”

No word yet on how the project will impact global warming. Cow flatulence is over 200 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of absorbing the infrared radiation that contributes significantly to global warming.