I couldn’t take all the tears. From the Los Angeles Times:

The system at Gills Onions, which will be unveiled to the public today, converts methane from fermented onion juice into energy burned in two on-site fuel cells.

The company has farms throughout California that send onions year-round to the Oxnard plant, where they are skinned, diced, sliced or packaged whole in a numbingly frigid facility by 400 employees. The vegetables are then shipped all over the country to wholesalers and retailers such as Ralphs.

Machines slice off about 40% of each onion. That leaves 150 tons of waste a day. For years, the Gills spread these leavings as fertilizer over their fields or sold them as cattle feed. But the refuse was expensive to handle, and it posed a hazard to the atmosphere and groundwater.

So the brothers decided to turn it into energy instead.

Machines extract about 30,000 gallons of onion juice that is then sent to a 145,000-gallon holding tank kept at a toasty 95 degrees. Inside, bacteria purchased from an Anheuser-Busch beer brewery produce methane gas by feasting on the carbohydrates in the fermenting juice.

“It’s like a big stomach,” said project manager Bill Deaton.

The gas is purified, dehumidified and compressed, then burned in the fuel cells at temperatures that exceed 1,000 degrees. The 600-kilowatt system produces enough power to operate the plant’s refrigeration units and lighting.

The Gills are also looking into installing a battery at the plant that can store excess electricity from the fuel cells. Reserve energy could be used during peak hours in the summer, when electricity is more expensive.

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