A New Reason to Cry: Onions for Energy
As electric vehicles gain traction, a concern is how to produce renewable energy to charge them up. Well, look no further than your refrigerator. One company is using onions to produce electricity and the owner, Steve Gill along with brother David Gill of Gills Onions, are crying all the way to the bank. In the new energy paradigm, many experts predict that we will no longer transport our energy around the world but will create it within our own communities. Using the waste juice from onions fits right into this scenario.
Gills Onions is the largest fresh onion processing plant in the world. The company has more than 15,000 acres of farmland and 300,000 square feet of processing and warehousing facility. Gill was looking for ways to reduce his costs in his farming operation when he began to experiment using the juice from his onion crop in Oxnard, California to create the energy to run his lighting and refrigerators. The result was the creation of an Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS).
