Recent upgrades at ReGen Monterey’s landfill will make it state-of-the-art in methane capture.

In the fight against climate change, there is no silver bullet that can put the existential threat to rest. Rather, it will require a combination of countless, incremental projects and innovations that each chip away at our greenhouse gas emissions or fossil fuel dependence.

Those projects are not always flashy. In the case of ReGen Monterey – the agency that manages the solid waste of the Monterey Peninsula – they can look as simple as a pipe sticking out of the ground with a hose attached to it, and then attached to that hose, an electronic control box powered by a small solar panel next to it.

This little electronic control box measures the amounts and types of gases coming out of the landfill, and every three hours, can make automatic adjustments to the pipe’s valve to optimize the quantity and quality of the gas captured, which is then turned to energy. Absent the control box, manually adjusting the valves in all 100 wellheads takes two days.

Last June, this little control box was installed on 18 of the 100 wellheads at ReGen’s landfill as part of a pilot project with LoCI Controls, a technology company that specializes in capturing methane and reducing emissions from landfills. The pilot project was supposed to last a year, but it proved so successful from the outset that in January, ReGen’s board approved spending $828,187 to automate the entire wellfield.

David Ramirez, ReGen’s director of engineering, estimates that automating those 18 wells for seven months captured the equivalent emissions of taking over 2,000 cars off the road for a year. LoCI devices to automate the entire wellfield were installed in March. The annual emission capture with the upgrade is estimated to be equivalent to taking 13,000 vehicles off the road for a year.

The upgrade is also going to provide ReGen with more, and better-quality gas to send to its power plant, which has 5-megawatt capacity. (ReGen uses 1 megawatt to power its operations and sells the rest as electricity to PG&E for over $1 million annually.)

Better-quality gas means the four engines at ReGen’s power plant will require less maintenance, Ramirez says. Even still, about half of the methane ReGen captures is flared off and not turned into energy because the power plant is at capacity. Decisions facing the board going forward include whether to invest in upgrading the plant to allow for more capacity, as well as potentially building infrastructure to convert the methane into renewable natural gas that could then be sold to PG&E at a higher price than electricity.

And already, a project is in the works to put in an electrical line to connect ReGen’s power plant to Monterey One Water’s adjacent advanced water purification facility.

That’s expected to come online in August or September, Ramirez says, and will allow ReGen to sell energy directly to M1W – ReGen will get a higher sale price, and M1W will get a lower energy bill.

“It’s a win-win,” says Zoe Shoats, ReGen’s communications director.