What goes down our toilet is not something most of us like to think about too much, but let's hear it for the Yorkshire Water engineers who have turned their minds to this unpleasant subject so we don't have to... and with rather remarkable results.

An upgraded £33 million waste plant at the Esholt water treatment works could eventually generate 75 gigawatt hours of energy over this year... or in real terms, enough power to make a massive three billion cups of tea.

As we as a global community steadily work our way through the fossil fuels such as oil and coal everyone is looking for the next source of energy to keep the lights on across the world.

Such blue-sky thinking as being carried out by Yorkshire Water is exactly the sort of innovation we need to ensure that we both have the power we need and reduce our impact on the environment.

We desperately need to find alternative sources of energy, as evidenced by the recent boom in controversial "fracking" practices to release shale gas deposits from around the country.

The power behind three billion cups of tea is a lot of energy, and while such a project is never, of course, going to replace traditional forms of energy generation on its own, it might well work with other innovations to give us more options over the coming decades.

So we should all raise a glass - or perhaps one of those many, many cups of tea - to the bright sparks at Yorkshire Water who have come up with this plan. It's a dirty job, but someone had to do it, and for that we can be thankful.