Energy consumption – it’s a big deal this days, and several news stories over the past year have touched on the affect it has on our environment and pocket books. Is the solution to use less energy? Should we all buy technology equipment and other products that require less energy to run? Or maybe we should use dog poop to power up our PC. According to this News.com story, the latter option may actually be a viable alternative: “Dog poop–the next alternative energy source?“

San Francisco’s garbage company, Norcal Waste Systems, is starting a pilot program to recycling the droppings of the city’s estimated 120,000 dogs. “Dog feces could be scooped into a methane digester, a device that uses bugs and microorganisms to gobble up the material and emit methane, which would be trapped and burned to power a turbine to make electricity or to heat homes.”

If you’re a dog owner, this may not seem like a bad deal. With the rising cost of gas, I imagine that dog poop will eventually have a price tag. I’d like to see the specifications here – like how much poop would be needed to load Windows? How many minutes could I browse News.com? Would I still have time to blog? Hmmmm….