Bad Bottles of Wine Can Be Used for Energy
A bad bottle can throw a wrench in your dinner party, but researchers in the U.S. and India say it could also lower your energy bills. Using the leftover vinegar and sugar in improperly fermented wine, those scientists are devising novel methods to turn wastewater from vineyards into electricity and hydrogen, cleaning the water in the process. It takes a good deal of water to process grapes into the fermented sugars that give wine that lovely, drowse-inducing quality. The wastewater coming out of vineyards is packed with unfermented sugars, biomass, and improperly fermented vinegar. Generally, all that wastewater has to be cleaned, and that can be costly; something like 1.5 percent of American electricity goes toward wastewater treatment, and up to five percent goes toward other water management systems. So Penn State researchers are using microbes to convert those waste products into energy rather than dumping them into an energy-wasting treatment cycle....