Today our team is thrilled to report the official groundbreaking for the new anaerobic digester plant on Old Santa Fe Road in San Luis Obispo. The plant will produce electricity from food waste – enough to power 600 homes annually. As the architects behind the project, Studio Design Group Architects is proud to play an important role in the future of energy production in our community.
“This is going to be the first facility like it in the entire United States….that’s a big deal,” San Luis Obispo County Supervisor Adam Hill told a few dozen engineers, waste disposal industry insiders and Central Coast agricultural leaders at the groundbreaking ceremony.
“This project will be taking green waste and food waste from residential and commercial entities, processing the material inside an enclosed building, going through an anaerobic digester to create biogas,” William Skinner, West Coast manager of Hitachi Zozen Inova. “We’ll be creating electricity from that, with the resulting compost from the digester being used in local agricultural farms.”
The completed facility will divert and process over 100 tons of garbage that would typically sit in a landfill. Studio Design Group expects the plant to be up and running by the summer of 2018.