ENOUGH electricity was created last month to power 3,600 homes at a plant in Bradford - just by using our poo.

Yorkshire Water's high-tech water treatment works in Esholt used human waste to create 490MWh of electricity in one record-performing week in September.

The £34 million Thermal Hydrolysis Plant opened in 2014 with the sole intention of creating energy from poo to power the site and supply any excess electricity to the National Grid.

In that record breaking week, enough power was created form Bradford's poo to power the plant and 3,600 homes in the city.

It may come as a surprise to some that electricity can be created from human waste, but Yorkshire Water said it is common practise in the water sector.

Gavin Stowell, plant engineer at Yorkshire Water said: “Technology such as Thermal Hydrolysis and anaerobic digestion that is able to generate electricity from sludge is crucial to help power our energy intensive waste water treatment processes.

"As a business, we have an annual electricity bill of around £50 million but by embracing the highly efficient THP process, this helps us keep costs down with the added benefit of supplying electricity to the National Grid.”

Using poo for power is helping Yorkshire Water to meet its commitment of creating up to 12 per cent of its energy from renewable sources.

Currently Esholt is Yorkshire Waters only Thermal Hydrolysis plant, but in the future the company would be able to attach the technology onto its new treatment plants if required. Similar technology, anaerobic digestion, is currently used at 18 other sewage sites.

The system works by heating up the poo to 165ºC to kill off any pathogens, which then enables the bio-digestion process to generate more methane gas per unit of poo, which is used to power Combined Heat and Power systems to generate electricity.

Even the leftovers from the process can be reused, as fertiliser by the agricultural sector, which means no poo ends up in landfill.