Slashdot Mirror
Vermont Launches 'Cow Power' System
odyaws writes "Central Vermont Public Service has launched Cow Power, a system by which power users can opt to buy 25, 50, or 100% of their electricity from dairy farms that run generators on methane obtained from cow manure. Cow Power costs only 4 cents/kWh more than market price, so a household like mine would only pay $5-6/month more at 100% usage. The big question now is whether Vermont-based Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream will use power generated from the manure of cows treated with Recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone."
Way to go... let's marginalize every single attempt to seek out alternative power sources. This way we can be married to oil for that much longer. Look on the bright side.. your kids get to see the middle east.
$0.04 per kwh on top of the regular rates is about 50% higher.
I think someone misplaced a decimal point. I use about 1500
kwh per month. This extra cost would be $60 per month, not $6.
It would be cheaper to pay farmers not to farm than to come
up with kooky schemes like this that pay them twice - once for
their crazy milk subsidies then again to get rid of the methane
gas that it produces.
We might as well run power plants fueled by combusting dollar bills.
Ok, I get the whole "pay a bit more because it's a GoodThing(TM)" concept, but as a marketing strategy it stinks (forgive the pathetic pun).
So let me get this straigth: you (the consumer) enrols to receive a percentage of your "power" from these guys (up to 100% only from them), and all your money (including the extra 4 cent per kWh, no idea how much the actual price per kWh you have, but I personally pay only about 10-15 cent per kWh, so an extra 4 cent would increase my bill easily by 30% or more) and only "markert price" (no idea how that much that is, but definetely way less than what you get charged as end-user) goes directly to the "manufacturer".
In other words, you basically just make a donation to the "cow power" people, but a donation that's not regarded as donation per se (well, it doesn't specify that, I was just assuming).
So what's stopping you from just using regular power and donating as much $$$ as you want directly to the people involved ?
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Calculations, done correctly:
20 dollars = 2000 cents
2000/500 = 4 cents per kwh. Which then goes to the farmers.
40%? Where?
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
A 200W PSU for a computer will consume 144 kWh per month. Just that comp alone would cost $6 extra to run.
Given that the submitter "odyaws" reports his electricity usage at about 150 kWh/month, that puts him smack in the middle of cheap-ass mom's basement dwellers.
Either the guy is blowing smoke outta his ass about the true cost, or he's the kind of guy that runs AC off the street lamp.
Average American person sucks up over 700 kWh/month. Traditional successfull 'geek' household (decent AC, two-car heated garage, freezer/fridge, range/microwave, CCTV, plasma in the basement, gadgets, 24/7 computers, VAX cluster (winter heating), wireless, hot tub) will eat up 10,000 kWh easily.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Also, its methane obtained from cow manure. I imagine the farmers keep the cow manure and uses to fertilize the grass.
Well in case you're not familar with the area, Vermont used to be something like 95% farmland in area that wasn't forested. We're losing that out to relatively large urban development and a huge influx of people to the Burlington area to hit our new array of large chain stores (WalMart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond, etc). Less than ten years ago, the only big store in the state was Costco, and that's about 20 miles north of everything else (which is a decent distance in VT, considering how freakin' small we are) and has been there for as long as I can remember. Prior to the development, there used to be nothing more than large open fields with a whole lot of nothing.
Long story short, you're actually exactly right - we don't want this becoming extremely popular in the area. The simple fact is that we don't have nearly as many cows as we did ten years ago, since it's all done in massive superfarms out west. We've had laws passed that keep the milk prices artifically high just so the few family-owned farms still in business don't go under - they're all operating on razor-thin margins as it is, and many are losing money but stay around out of love for what they do.
We actually have a fairly large percent of our population that ARE willing to pay more to be green. My neighbors coughed up for a hybrid not for the gas savings (my father did the math pre-Katrina - even at $3.50/gal, you need to drive about 250,000 miles before you break even after the premium over a standard model) but because it's green - they also paid what I'd imagine is a good bit more for an electric lawnmower instead of a gas-powered one. We've voted down at least half a dozen times a bypass that connects all of the largely-retail areas together, simply due to pollution. While we're largely divided on things like the same-sex civil unions, most of the people in my state put the environment before the economy.
So while the idea may sound like a load of shit to you, the fact is that there wouldn't be enough shit to go around. I hate to be cliche', but this is a perfect example of "if we all do a little, we can all do a lot". Yes, one person using an alternative energy source just makes that person feel good inside, but if we all do it, there's a significant impact. It's not our only alternative idea - we've also looked into using trees in a similar way to a potato-battery (which largely did nothing, one tree had less power than a potato) among several other out-there ideas.
If we've got a dozen different alternative energy methods out there, and each has just 2% of the population using them, we've gone and shifted a quarter of the country - 75 million people - away from oil. While vehicles do tend to need a standard, there's absolutely no reason for every house in the country to get their power from the same method. And already they aren't. But say that we can make all farms not only self-sufficient but even generate a bit of extra power. It may not do a lot out here where the farms are going the way of the Dodo, but out in the land of megafarms, it could actually make a significant impact. I actually know Jerry's (of Ben and Jerry's) wife and son personally (had class with him, in fact), and I can assure you that it would certainly be a B&J thing to do if they found yet another way to support the local community and do something good for the environment.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
And that, along with just a dash of racism, is why it's illegal.
What a wonderfully long tradition buying laws has...
Over here in good old-jock-land, we've been doing this for years. When we are not drinking whiskey we are building hydroelectric dams and wind power farms. Several of the electicity companies offer schemes where you pay a little more for your energy, but get a guarantee that it's coming from green sources.
It's not the feel-good factor or the money that's important. What matters is that you aren't pissing in your childrens swimming pool.
YEAH! Cos like, the domestic farm industry is litteraly rolling in money, right? In actual fact they need government subsidies and regulation to stay afloat. That's the simple matter of it.
And if the best you can do is "bad because someone receives money from it", then how the hell do you live your life? Do you mind your oil money going to even richer and textbook-"evil" Saudis?
While I'm not disagreeing with you on the whole "nuclear is better for the environment than fossil fuels" idea here, I gotta say, you'd have to be batshit fecking crazy to want to use Sr-90 as a fuel source.
This stuff will give you bone cancer . Not exactly what I'd want to put under the hood of every car in the world, especially when accidents are so common. Plus, there's the whole "spontainiously combusts in the open air" business.
I'd think you'd get better results using nuclear plants to generate hydrogen from water using high-temperature electrolysis - that way you centralize your nuclear waste and fuel. You wouldn't really want a mini-generator in every home or every car for the reasons listed above, but regulated and properly governed nuke plants have a solid safety record.
The problem with that of course is it's a huge overhaul of our transportation system.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
This isn't the first time I've seen this. Up in minnesota, we actually received letters giving us the option to use wind power - for more money on the KW-hour of course. What bothers me about all these advertisements for alternative power from utility companies is that they don't give me a business case for paying the extra money to switch to an alternative form of energy.
Who are they kidding? Why would I want to pay more for energy? One could argue that energy prices will always increase, but what utility companies are asking us to do is to pay extra money on top of already increasing energy prices.
I say, why not provide us with a sustainable business case? Tell me why I'm paying extra, and what the alternative utilities are going to do to try and eventually be competitive with fossil fuels because - let's face it - if it costs more it's not competitive.
There may be some immeasurable social benefit, or a measurable ecological benefit, but in the end, if it just plain costs more, then it's not going to make me switch. In my opinion, without presenting the sustainability, profitability, and lowering future of alternative energy to the consumer, all these efforts by utility companies are really just posturing. Tell me why I'm paying the extra money!
The laws of thermodynamics aren't proved either. Evidence is examined, and tentative theories are formulated. Nothing is proved. Welcome to science.
http://outcampaign.org/
I can and do offset the carbon emissions from my small truck for $50/year, and get all of my energy from green sources (mostly wind and biomass) by paying an extra 1.6 cent/kwhr.
I am almost completely green for $120 a year. Why aren't you?
50% of people (and 99% percent of liberals) whine about the environment, and what the government should do to force everyone else (especially big business) to do something about it. 1% do something avoid hypocrisy and do something themselves.
Join the one percent...
As others have said, reactors built today won't meltdown even at a rate of "one meltdown per 1000 years". Even if they did, there are far more containment structures in place to prevent it from getting off the plant grounds.
TMI was the USA scare that got us to pay more attention to disaster scenarios. Even IF we had a Chernobyl type explosion in the states, it wouldn't be the big deal it was in Chernobyl since all nuclear reactors are covered by a pressure rated dome. Basically, they're pre-enclosed in a sarcophagus already.
Basically, even with Chernobyl you can argue that coal has killed more people.
Nuclear Power deaths: 3 Japanese workers*
Chernobyl: 47 workers/accident responders, 9 children died of thyroid cancer, and IAEA/WHO estimate that 9000 more might die of cancer. Please excuse me for not using Greenpeace numbers, as they are both biased and known to exaggerate. 9000, in the last 20 years.
Let's take a look at coal.
Wiki says:2004 alone cost China 6,000 workers, though some estimate as high as 20,000. US Coal mining is far safer, with only about 30 deaths/year. Still, we have yet to cover the health effects. 23,600 per year due to air pollution, in the USA alone.
If you figure 1 nuclear meltdown/worst case disaster every thousand years, that kills the same # as chernobyl, that's an average annual death toll of 9 people. Meanwhile, coal mining in the US kills 30, even if you figure in that pollution controls eventually stops all the air pollution.
There's a reason I'd love to shut down every coal plant and replace it with a nuclear one. Preferably breeders that allow us to take all the 'waste' piling up around current reactors and burn it as more fuel again.
*who violated every safety reg in the book, mixing many times the amount of nuclear materials in a steel bucket rather than using the provided shielded equipment meant to do it in limited, but safe, quantities.
I don't read AC A human right