The French are already known for leading the world in nuclear power, and now they are venturing into a new and particularly French method of energy production: generating power from cheese.

The renewable energy company Valbio has built a power plant in the French Alps that uses whey, a byproduct of cheese production, to generate enough energy to support a community of 1,500. That's not quite enough energy to power the entire 18,000-person town of Albertville where the cheese plant is located, but it's an impressive use of organic waste as an energy source.

The new power plant gets its whey from Beaufort cheese, made in the same region, and combines it with bacteria to cause fermentation and produce a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide gases. That gas powers an engine that heats water to 194 degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting energy production amounts to about 2.8 million kilowatt-hours per year.

The first cheese power plant was built by Valbio ten years ago near an abbey where monks have been making cheese for almost 1,000 years. But the new Albertville plant is significantly larger, and it sells energy to Électricité de France (EDF), the largest producer of electricity in the world.

Source: The Telegraph

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