Posted on 04/26/2008 8:08:51 PM PDT by Lorianne
The politicians (esp the democraps) there produce enough bullcrap to generate electricity for 250,000 homes (at least)!!
I read about some biofuel plant in Ireland that picked up the waste and transported it to the plant for free. I guess the economics worked for them that way.
At merchant power rates of 0.04 $/kWh plus the monthly savings of $4,000/month for sawdust bedding, I calculate a simple payback of less than 10 years (ignoring cost of capital and ignoring O&M costs). Add in those, and payback is probably less than 20 years.
If the farm were required to install odor control, the payback would be a lot less.
This actually sounds like it might be a decent investment.
Under Net Metering Policy Pennsylvania has to basically run your electric meter backwards or another meter forward to pay you for electricity you generate thus essentially paying retail rates to the generating cutomer.
Pennsylvania’s residental rate is slightly over $.10/kwh. but since the dairy would not pay residental rates it wouldn’t recieve residental rate credits.
Given the lack of details all our calculations are a bit of guess work. We don’t know how much the grants were, was any money borrowed to pay for the digester and if so with what terms?, or the cost of operating the digester.
Still it’s a good idea but whether it can be done at or above a break even point is another question.
In Mt View, California, the city built an outdoor music theater on top of a recently capped landfill. They forgot to put in a methane collection system, and during the first year of operation you had to be very careful about lighting cigarettes! No joke.
It might well be but the article doesn’t have enough details to allow for much more than calculated guesses.
yes it could. Think of all the poultry farms across the country. Fryers are raised to 7 to 8 weeks and then houses cleaned out. It would work there as well.
I was using 6.8 cents for my calc and came up with payback on power sales alone ($99,280.00 / year) in 10 years , the $4k in savings on bedding a month is another $48K per year bonus ... payback in under 7 years ..
wholesale electricity prices in PA .. http://www.econstats.com/fut/xeiae_em2.htm
None of this is anything new. There are folks in India building thier own biogas plants to generate cooking gases. These plants use kitchen scraps to produce enough methane to cook three meals a day for a family of four.
http://www.bioenergylists.org/en/compactbiogas
If methane can be harnessed this way, my brother-in-law alone should be able to light up Texas all by himself!
Maybe they came up with some new microbes which like the cold better. Keeping 50,000 gallons of wet manure @105 degrees in -20 degree weather is not esay. If it got too cold, all the bacteria would en masse, die off.
The article said "fair market value," which should mean that the farm should get paid what other electrical companies get paid when their company buys electricity, possibly excluding some infrastructure fees. It certainly shouldn't be the retail price that home owners nor businesses pay.
Mark
One of our electric utilities wanted to include an anaerobic digester in its new (and much needed) coal plant. The governor, disregarding all laws and regs, denied the whole project...but did allow another utility (which has been very good to her campaign)to charge anything it pleases if it will put up a few wind turbines.
Oh, and she thinks she’ll be your next Vice President.
Try driving I-10 going east into El Paso, TX some day, as I did about a year and a half ago. You travel through, and smell the effluvia of, at least ten miles of feed lots strung along the interstate. Something like this might be feasible there and do a lot for the travelers who have to run the gauntlet.
Another thing we found, is that methane digesters are extremely dangerous. Storage is a real problem.
What's dangerous about the digesters? What are the storage problems, and do those problems involve the methane or something else? These are both non-antagonistic technical questions, especially because, on its surface, this looks like a promising technology for turning a definite pollutant into economical energy.
I guess if you kept your holding/regulating system far away from the barns (like 1000'), that would work better.
I guess if we'd spent a few million on technology we'd have come out better. We spent about $2,500 and used scrap/farm fabricated materials. We could have used it for our house needs from May thru September. Once it dropped to the teens and below it was not feasible. Too much energy spent to heat the slurry.
And FWIW, our insurance company would not continue our policy with an on-site methane digester. We did have some really impressive fireballs.
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