GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — After five years of waiting, Grand Rapids has its biodigester up and running.
The $85 million investment was built on the idea of saving the city money and passing the savings on to its ratepayers.
Grand Rapids Environmental Services gave FOX 17 an inside look at its latest project, the biodigester located off Market Avenue.
"They're essentially a stomach, we're running them at 98 degrees," said Manager Mike Grenier. "We believe that we built the foundation going forward for the city. As far as new treatment technologies go, it's put us where we normally are as a leader in technology inside the industry."
This treatment technology requires a lot of balance.
"You need three things for the digester to work and that's food and the right pH and needs the right temperature. And those are basically the three things that we could control," Grenier told FOX17.
The biodigester sits in the back of the Grand Rapids Water Resource Recovery facility.
The system works to both produce natural gas and to reduce the amount of solid waste going into landfills.
"What that does is it takes the municipal solids from the bottom of our tanks, and goes ahead and breaks those down using bacteria to produce methane that we can clean and sell as well as reduce our solids that limit what has to go to the landfill," Grenier added.
Grenier says they're sending around 40% less waste to the landfill, which saves them money. They're also selling the gas made from this process to DTE.
He says they estimate $2.5 million in revenue this year, which is good news for consumers.
"Oh, yeah. Yes. And that's, that's part of our rate makings structure. So we go ahead. And we spend a lot of time on a rate making. So we go ahead, we take those revenue numbers that goes into the rate making costs, we take all our costs, that goes into the two rate making. And then we figure out where those are going to be. It should, if not drive down help limit those from going up," Grenier said.
However, the project has taken longer than originally thought. The city broke ground on this expansion in 2017. Grenier says in a couple weeks they plan to have the third and final biodigester in operation.
"And at the front end of COVID. We lost months of just trying to get a body either back to Germany or back over here from Germany to help with the construction," Grenier said.
The original price tag was$38 million, with nearly $50 million more added over the years due to added projects along the way like phosphorus recovery for fertilizer use. Grenier says they're still early in the process of having that added revenue.
Officials say it's absolutely worth it.
"I'd like to tell people is if we weren't finishing this project right now, we'd be starting it right now," Grenier said.
Now, many have shown concern about the smell coming from the area. City officials tell us it's from the water treatment plant, which has open tanks, and not actually from the biodigester.
