Company wins $4.5m in venture funds to test energy source

Ze-Gen planning to convert trash to clean-burning gas

Every day in America, Boston energy entrepreneur Bill Davis calculates, trash gets thrown out that has enough latent energy content to generate 110,000 megawatts of electricity — five times the typical demand for all of New England.

Now Davis’s company, Ze-Gen Inc., is about to take a first small step towards proving whether that trash could be a new clean-burning electric generation source of the future. It’s disclosing today it has closed on $4.5 million in venture capital funding for a New Bedford test facility.


Around the country, trash and landfills are already producing electricity. Across the country, about 90 electric generating stations, including facilities in Rochester and Saugus, burn trash to produce steam to power turbines, producing enough power for 2.3 million average homes, according to the Solid Waste Association of North America.

At hundreds of landfills, including sites in Braintree and New Bedford, methane gas seeping from decomposing trash is collected and used as the fuel source for producing electricity equal to the demand of 1.2 million homes , or 1,600 megawatts, according to the US Energy Department.

Boston Globe