Posted on 04/26/2008 8:08:51 PM PDT by Lorianne
MOUNT JOY, Pa. — The Brubaker family never thought they would be in the energy business, but today their dairy farm is creating enough electricity to light a small town.
Hundreds of people, ranging from politicians to local farmers, were at Brubaker Farms in Mount Joy earlier this month to help unveil a new anaerobic manure digester that has been producing as much as 4,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a day since December - enough electricity to power as many as 200 homes.
Mike Brubaker, who runs the farm in partnership with his father, Luke, and his brother, Tony, said delving into energy production has been a "new adventure" on the 1,500-acre dairy farm, creating what they have dubbed "cow power."
"Our focus has always been on quality food production which it will continue to be but now we're also taking a look at how to better use our resources that we have to work with," Mike Brubaker said. "So that's why we're taking a dual approach, looking at how we can make energy out of another product coming from our good cows that we love."
The Brubakers said the high price of fuel and rising grain prices for livestock feed have forced farmers to look for alternatives to add value to their farms. They also are looking to improve efficiency on the farm, so they waste as little as possible.
Through years of research, the Brubakers discovered manure digester systems.
The digester breaks down manure collected from livestock. The methane gas from the digestion process is harnessed and is fed into an engine that generates electricity.
The Brubakers installed the engine last year. The farm uses a small percentage of the electricity, and the rest is fed through power lines directly into the energy grid.
Although the digester cost more than $1 million to build, the Brubakers said rising energy prices makes projects like it more feasible and cost-effective. Power companies have also been forced through legislation to pay a fair market rate for energy put into the grid something they have not had to do in the past.
Solid waste from the digester is also used for animal bedding instead of sawdust a savings of as much as $4,000 a month. The Brubakers sell some of the solid waste as high-quality mulch.
Mike Brubaker said there are serious environmental benefits to the digester, including decreasing manure odor by as much as 90 percent and keeping methane gas out the atmosphere.
"We can really get excited about teaming up an economic benefit along with an environmental benefit," he said. "It's a real win-win situation."
At least three other digester projects have been built in Lancaster County. Harlan Keener, a former West Lampeter Township hog farmer, installed a digester to create electricity in 1985.
Mark Moser, president of RCM International of California, the developer of the digester, said his firm has installed 70 digesters across the U.S., including one at Turkey Hill Dairy.
Moser said the digesters started taking off in popularity around 2000 when energy prices started to rise. He said energy prices and government grants are what has made the digesters successful.
Moser said the technology is improving with the use of better engines that produce more energy.
"It's always gratifying to light the flare, start the engine and make electricity," Moser said. "It's the fun of the job."
Luke Brubaker, who got into farming more than 30 years ago with 18 cows, said he never would have imagined he would be producing electric.
Now the 730 cows on the family farm have added a new dimension to their dairy production. He said each day three to four cows can produce enough electricity for an average home.
"We're not using our grains to make electricity here," Luke Brubaker said. "We're using something that we were just losing into the air before. I think it's going to be a wave of the future on larger dairies where you can capture that methane from the manure."
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.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.