Eli5, Why do landfills merely burn off ex bytra gas into flames, why can’t they generate electricity or something with that gas?
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Some do. But setting up a power plant that can do that has extra equipment/costs associated with it compared to a power plant that runs straight off natural gas. So the amount produced needs to be enough that the savings from using landfill gas offset the cost of extra equipment.
As an example, the Keele Valley landfill was 3rd largest in North America. A power plant was built in 1994 to use the methane. It had a gas turbine and two boilers that powered a steam turbine. It also had sets of large blowers in order to draw the gas from the landfill and send it to the system at a useable rate/pressure.
By the time I did a college work placement there ~20 years later, they were removing the gas turbine which hadn’t been used in years. The boilers required a fairly large amount of natural gas in addition to the landfill gas in order to operate at full capacity. Gas power plants can last for 40 years, so this was halfway through it’s life cycle.
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