Cow Manure --> Electricity

jmtpi writes "ABCNews has a story about a dairy farm in Minnesota that uses its cow manure to generate enough electricity to power the farm plus 80 homes and create fertilizer. There's also a more detailed story."

Comments

When I was a kid...

[DwarfGoanna]

I thought the future was going to get bigger, brighter, better, and flying (cars). Now as I get older, and understand more about population issues, it seems we are going to have to come up with more and more clever ways of re-using waste products. I suppose this is better in the long run (?) but hopefully I will still be able to drive a flying, shit-powered car before I die. Hopefully I can get the OUTATIME vanity plate someone else in my state does.

Re:Inefficient

[EllisDees]

The cows are primarily being used to produce milk. Generating power is just a benefit of recycling their shit. Either way, the same amount of wast is produced, but one way we are doing something useful with it.

a positive trend

[updog]

OK, instead of posting some redundant shit joke, consider what this farm and 80 households are doing.

So this might not be the most technologically amazing invention, and it's clearly not going to solve the world's energy problems. But it is an inspiring example of how a few individuals can actually do something less destructive for the environment without being mandated to do so by government regulations.

At the risk of sounding trite, consider what you can do to have a less destructive impact on our planet, even if it doesn't involve thousands of gallons of shit a day.

Re:a positive trend

[Dunark]

At the risk of sounding trite, consider what you can do to have a less destructive impact on our planet, even if it doesn't involve thousands of gallons of shit a day.

I'm a telecommuter. My 3.5-year-old car has less than 6,000 miles on it, so I'm using less gasoline and producing a lot less pollution than most commuters.

We supposedly have all this excess bandwidth left over from the dotcom bubble, so I think more people should use it in this manner. Also, buying OPEC oil so we can gather together in big buildings to make nice targets for terrorists doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Re:a positive trend

[zogger]

Hey, good for you man! I got one, that you can benefit from and your kid will love it. Get a garden! Even a 10 foot by 10 foot garden will produce an amazing amount of food, and there's always stuff the kid can do once they get past toddler stage into the running around energy up the wazoo stage. I started gardening when I was 4 years old, haven't missed a season yet. Our gardens are much bigger than 10 by 10, but still, I had a lot of smaller ones like that over the years. It's practical, easy to do, and you get direct benefits without filtering it through the stupid cash/store/taxes/outside job deal. Even if you are in an apartment you can garden, just use cheap large normal household decorative plant pots, just plant veggies instead of palm trees and philodendrons! Use some stakes from the garden center, grow some stuff like cherry tomatoes and peas and cucmbers, etc indoors, just stick then in front of sunny windows. Save money on chow bill, you get decent organic food, and teach yourself and child some nifty stuff. win/win/win all around. If you want a good inexpensive primer on doing small but very good gardens, I would recommend a book called "square foot gardening", will tell ya all you need to get started. If you have another spare window or some roof or wall space on the south side, get started on solar PV. Even one panel, one charge controller and a deep cell battery you can run some decent 12 volt stuff. Plus, it's a good backup emergency "power" source that will be there if your grid goes out, like a lot of places happens occasionaly. Before I got more, one panel was all my girlfriend and I had for power, we ran a reading light, small b/w tv and the radio off of it, and that was IT for our power. but just a light, tv, radio or a laptop for a bit is 'enough" for backup, and you can start using it right then. For the light, any autoparts store has 12 volt fluorescents for around 10$, and the small tvs and stuff are easy to find and cheap.

Good luck! Kids are a great excuse to "learn and do". Both of you benefit from it!

Re:pollution?

[einhverfr]

The manure is not burned, rather it is "cooked" at 100 degrees (C or F, dunno), and the methane is collected. Yes, methane. Natural gas, in other words. Not the cleanest stuff ever, but it's definitely better than coal.

Also bear in mind that most of that methane would end up in the atmophere if it wasn't burned and would be a whole lot worse, envirnmentally speaking. Generating electicity *and* helping to prevent polution. It is good to see something like this :-)

Re:Inefficient

[Grishnakh]

Comparisons to the amount of energy that could be generated if you used the land to farm crops that could be used for biodiesel.

You and a lot of other people on here are missing something important here: the farmer's prime goal is NOT to produce electricity. It is to produce milk. And to grow some crops on his 1000 acres. The electricity is just a convenient by-product of the cows, and of the process used to reduce the manure odor so that he doesn't bother his neighbors. I'm sure he has no interest in converting his whole farm to biodiesel production.

Maybe its time for the craftsman/farmer to move on and see what engineers can do.

Speaking as an engineer, we would have a bunch of cross-site meetings with various stakeholders, we would write up thousands of pages of feasibility documents, create innumerable Powerpoint presentations, hire a bunch of contractors and consultants since we don't have the required expertise, then the company would fire the whole lot of us and contract someone from India to do the job because it costs less. They would do roughly the same thing, and in the end the company would give up on the whole project and write it off as a business loss, and nothing substantive would have actually been done.

being done all over

[zogger]

--collecting methane at sewer plants and from city dumps is being done on a large scale at over 200 US municiplaities. It works quite well.

World wide there are literally hundreds of thousands of them (methane digesters using anareobic digestion), most of them being single family sized units where the collected gas is burned in small cookers and for lighting.

I built a digester in the mid 70's, was EXTEREMELY easy to make. I worked on a large dairy then, despite running the digester for all summer and collecting gas, just a small display size prootype unit, I could NOT get the farmer to drive over one mile to my cabin to look at it. His stock question was "why aren't THEY doing it if it is so good?" The gas collected was great, basically burned like propane. I tried other farmers over the years,I have yet to get one to take the plunge and actually do anything different, alwatys the same, it ain't in their propaganda magazines for their particular niche for farming. You can NOT get those guys to do anything practical until they get "permission" from the agribiz cartels, and right now, the agribiz cartels want the farmers to buy expensive petroleum and chemical products from them or their country club buddies. and the farmers WONDER why they keep going broke....and they TEACH going broke in the ag colleges, which is AMAZING to me they can suck young guys into doing that.

grumble....

At least this one dairy farmer in the article gets it, it's probably only one in a thousand or less that can actually think for themselves. Work hard, 7 days a week, YEP! They do, been there done that meself. think outside the box? Hardly ever happens, so petrified of their buddies at the co-op and the feed store thinking they are "enviros" or something near as I can tell.

Flash forward almost 30 years now, I get the same thing today, I work part time on a large poultry farm, besides methane digestion I have also asked why they don't use sprouted grains instead of the dismal dried up crap they call "feed" that barely keeps the cluckers clucking. SAME ANSWER, because "they" don't do it, this "they" guy who tells them what to do, it's not in the trade mags so "it doesn't work, it's hippie pie in the sky stuff enviro whackos".

I LAUGH every time I hear of a farmer going broke, because if they only thought just a smidgen outside the box and stepped back from being brainwashed by archerdanielsdowmonsantoexxon, they could make money, and easily. But no, they'll defend practices that they follow that produce for them a lower profit return than their grand daddys got in world war two. Sure, they can grow huger volumes of much crappier food off an acre, deal is, it IS crappier food and they hand over their cash to the big companies, then the bank takes their property eventually. Lead around by the nose don't even begin to describe it.

And I get the same thing from urban internet engineering "experts" who have constantly told me over the years my solar panels don't work, they "aren't practical". Funny, my electric bill is PAID OFF, I don't get a "monthly" bill with no idea what it will be if there's any political or middleman trading shenanigans. but, "solar isn't practical".

Phooie

The 21st century will belong to those who can think out of the box and stop making money for BIGCO, who work FOR THEMSELVES, and stop supporting those brane dead politicians and political parties who are in BIGCO's pockets.

Re:Nothing new

[jamesl]

One of the source documents (from the State of Minn research people) estimates the capital cost to be $300,000 plus an additional 5% to 10% of that number per year in operational costs. At $0.30 per cow per day (from the electric co-op) and 750 cows, revenue is aprox $82,000 per year -- and the co-op is paying retail for the power. Assuming 10% per year depreciation ($30,000) on the capital cost and 7.5% for operation ($22,500), they're grossing a little less than $30,000 per year. AT RETAIL!

If they had to compete with a real power plant, they'd be better off flaring the gas off just like the real sewage plants do.

As a nation, we really are pretty efficient at generating electricity.