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It's all gone to sh...
I never thought I'd end up writing about sewage for a living, but increasingly that is what appears to be happening.
While the rapid expansion of the solar and wind energy industries has attracted miles of column inches and billions in venture capital, the biogas sector that is in many ways more mature, cost effective and environmentally friendly than its high profile rivals has quietly operated on the margins of the renewables sector.
Like a sewage works stuck out on the edge of town, everyone accepts that it is pretty important, but no one wants to pay it too much attention.
In many ways this is understandable. Regardless of whether you dress the underlying feedstock up as organic waste, compost, or manure, these systems are typically powered by a combination or rotting food and sewage - and no one likes to talk about that.
And yet, if people can get over their distaste for the world of sanitation, biogas technologies represent a great environmental and commercial opportunity.
The technology is remarkable simple, usually involving little more than anaerobic digestion plants and combined heat and power systems, both of which are now relatively mature. All you need to do is shovel in the waste, add some enzymes to speed up the natural break down of the material, capture the resulting gas and burn it off to create heat and power. It's obviously a little bit more complicated than that, but not much.
The fuel source is also entirely renewable and all but free, while the technology is capable of producing both energy and fertiliser, creating a sustainable closed loop system.
Moreover, it has the ability to kill two birds with one stone, cutting carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuel based energy, while also capturing methane - itself a potent greenhouse gas.
When you look at these advantages it is surprising that it has taken so long for people to realise that there is a huge commercial opportunity for those that can stand the smell, but slowly that now seems to be changing.
Plans for the world's first urban biogas pipe network in the German city of Lünen were recently unveiled and a number of UK councils are said to be watching the trial closely to see if similar projects could work over here.
Meanwhile, German biogas firm Agri.capital recently announced it had secured 60m in equity funding - no mean fit in the current climate - to help fund expansion plans.
But what is most exciting about the technology is the sheer scale of the opportunity. A study earlier this year from the UK government, which has somewhat belatedly signalled its support for the sector, calculated that deploying anaerobic digestion technologies across the UK's farming sector could generate enough heat and electricity to power two million homes.
A similar study for National Grid went further still, estimating that harnessing all the UK's organic waste streams, including farm, food and wood waste, as well as sewage, could generate enough biogas to heat half the homes in the country.
It calculated that a UK-wide biogas network could be developed for £10bn, which might sound a lot but is likely to be significantly cheaper than generating a similar amount of energy from other forms of renewable energy such as wind power.
When you consider the construction costs associated with building offshore wind farms miles from population centres and then connecting them to the grid, compared with the cost of installing an anaerobic digestor at a sewage plant - which by definition is close to centres of population - and then laying down some new pipes to connect it to a small scale CHP system, you start to see bbiogas networks have the potential to be a far cheaper and simpler option.
Whether the strength of this commercial case can encourage the power brokers in Whitehall and the City to step up investment in the less than glamorous world of sewage remains to be seen, but, as they say in Yorkshire, where there's muck, there's brass.
With the Daily Mail on our side, anything's possible…
You've got to love the Daily Mail.
Not the content, obviously, which is an appalling mix of crass hypocrisy, barely concealed xenophobia, self satisfied voyeurism masquerading as morality, and journalistic standards that long since passed through the both the gutter and the sewer and are now fast approaching bedrock.
No, what you've got to love about the Daily Mail is its chutzpah.
So, when it decides to run a huge splash on its front page about its new Banish the Bag campaign, it does not stop for a second to savour the irony evident in the fact that for years it was one of the strongest bastions of anti-environmental thinking in the mainstream media.
Nor does it display the slightest hesitation before claiming that the Marks & Spencers' decision to charge customers for plastic bags, which has been in the pipeline for months and was extensively trialled before the Mail had even begun to consider giving itself a green makeover, represents "a major breakthrough for the Daily Mail campaign".
Of course, you can say what you like about the Mail – and I often do – but the other thing you have to love about the paper is its unfalteringly accurate understanding of what its readers want.
The Mail is all about shifting units and has a long and ignoble history of changing its editorial line and erasing its previous positions as soon as it recognises it needs to adapt to its customers' changing world view.
In this light, the fact that it has decided that an attempt to Banish the Bag will resonate with readers says more about the increasingly green priorities of Middle England than any number of consumer attitude surveys.
If Daily Mail readers really are concerned about plastic bags and are even willing to forego a degree of convenience to tackle the problem then attitudes really are changing.
What's more, businesses will need to take note of this shift, because just as M&S will love the front page praise it has received today, no business will want to be singled out for criticism and accused of not responding to Mail readers' wishes.
