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."
I don't get what you're saying. How is it a scam? They pay the farmer for the power, plus a little bonus as an incentive to use otherwise wasted gas to provide an environmentally friendly source of power. I personally think it's an awesome idea - I wish there were more incentive for people to use and produce alternative power sources.
This is really a mooving story.
But seriously, it's about time people started doing things like this en masse. We waste a shitload of resources we could otherwise make use of on a daily basis (no pun intended). If this catches on and becomes more widespread across the dairy sections of the country, and perhaps the world, people will quickly start looking at how to use other resources to their advantage - how about the methane from other farm animals, or perhaps human waste passing through sewers? Admittedly most will seek profit from it, but it's really what's happening that counts, not why in this circumstance.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
It looks like the plan was to NOT letting this get too popular. The fact that customers have to pay more for this power AND the plan is to pay the farmers more than the current rate is the exact technique I'd use if I didn't want too many customers picking this option. Who's going to make the choice to pay about 30% more for energy?
This looks like a scam to make this look like the "green" thing to do when in fact, the result is going to make very little difference in how their energy is produced. Sounds just like Bush's hydrogen vs hybrid strategies.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
It's also worth mentioning that methane is a greenhouse gas. It's actually worse than Co2 in this regard, though far less common and also less stable.
Since decomposing cow manure is going to emit methane whether we tap it for power or not (as will the cows themselves) it stands to reason that letting the methane go to waste is more of a greenhouse gas contributor than burning it. After all, the Co2 we release from combusting it will be resorbed by the plants the cows themselves eat, whereas the methane will not. And if we don't burn the stuff, it'll just end up in the atmosphere anyways.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Dude, is it common over there to be such a power hog? Geez.
I generally have better things to do than read up about burning cow poo but I'm curious about one thing...
I'm assuming this is marketed towards people who want some sort of "green energy" powering their homes. Is this really a clean(er) fuel source?
Sure, burning your favorite fossil fuel on a large scale isn't exactly clean. It is however heavily regulated and uses countless filters & scrubbers to clean up most of the nasty by-products. I'd be tempted to believe that a random milk farmer burning a few tons of cow manure in the back yard would be worse for the environment.
... there is no way you can actually draw power specifically from the farm. Electricity flows into The Grid, it flows out of The Grid, but once its on the Grid it doesn't care whether its coal, nuclear, cow flatulence, whatever -- there are no special ways to flavor an electrical charge. So what you're really doing is making a donation to the Cow Power farm to put a little juice back onto the grid... when they get paid already for doing that (you can, too: most states will let you bill the electric company if you use negative amounts, for example if you install a home solar system).
If you really have your knickers in a twist about global warming take the money you were going to spend on donations to Cow Power and use it on insulation. You'll reduce your heating/cooling costs and decrease your own personal energy consumption, which will have a bigger environmental impact (measured in units of "infintessimally small", of course) than just changing x% of your energy budget from fossil fuels to marginally cleaner methane.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I have a commemorative "Vermont's Swinest" Ben and Jerry's T-shirt (complete with holstein styled pigs), they made them when they started a deal to supply a local pig farm (I believe near the Waterbury plant) with milk waste.
The milk waste would be fed to the pigs along with the ususal feed, I don't recall where the pig waste / methane was headed.
IIRC The first three pigs, by contract, were to be named "Ben", "Jerry" and "Ed" in honor of Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield and Ed Stanek - the Vermont EPA official who brokered the deal.
When I worked on the old NSF Student Originated Studies program, one of the 1980 projects out of Iowa was to use manure methane to fire a still, ferment leftover corn waste into alcohol, feed the leftovers from the fermentation back into the pig feed, and use the alcohol in the machinery. Decent efficiencies in the pilot, but a hard sell to the farmers, as they needed smaller farms to go in together to get the delta-t they needed for peak efficiency, and it smacked of big entities twisting little family farm arms. In fact despite the NSF badge, it was just a bunch of undergrads, but still no sale.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
more This one has a tons of facts covering replacing various industrial materials, historical uses, etc.
more Much shorter page but some others on the site are good reading.Jonah HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Vermont is one of the poorer states in the nation, where a large percentage of the population has serious trouble during the winter heating their homes. But at the same time, Vermont has dairy farms every where you look, it's one of the dominant traits of the landscape. Might as well use what you've got!
Also, kudos to the people who thought to start this program in the summer, give it time to work out all the kinks. I've always admired Vermont for their forward-looking thinking, after all the yeller Howard Dean was their gov'na for long time (and despite his unfortaunte public persona, he's got great ideas too).
lol, i read your post and pictured Matrix-like plantation, with cows hooked up to the system to collect their farts...
:(
great. now gotta clean pepsi off the monitor
Here's an idea
Instead of growing food to feed the cows and having methane producing manure to contend with, we eat the food and not the cows !!
Meat production (especially from cows) is a crazily inefficient way to feed ourselves and at 50x the water consumption of potatoes.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The market tends to be a reactive, rather than proactive, solution. That makes it ideal for short term adaptation and blind effeciency, but terrible for problems that are urgent and require long term investment - and this is the latter.
What we need to do now is mostly R&D and prototype work. When and if those pan out, then the free market takes over; even a less than totally cheap solution can be competative if it has advantages otehr than price, and "green" marketing is exactly the sort of thing that can make up for the difference in price.
However, as is usually the case, the groundwork can't wait for the free market to take an interest. We won't get alternative fuels without someone doing research into possible sources and people building prototypes that might or might not work. There's no gain in that if you're a for-profit corporation. Money takes the path of least resistance; trying to get it to flow somewhere that's not conductive to profit is like trying to get a lightling strike on a street level object in manhattan.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
The manure isn't removed from the agricultural system. The stuff is piled -- mostly over the Winter because the cows spend most of their time in the fields when the weather isn't too awful. It is spread on the fields in Spring. The stored manure generates methane whether the methane is burned for electrical generation or not.
Nothing wrong with this idea, but if you ask me, what Vermont really needs to stabilize rates and reduce carbon emissions is two more nuclear power plants. The chances of 'environmentalists' embracing relatively non-polluting nuclear power appear to be close to zero. The panacea d'jour seems to be gargantuan windmills in someone else's backyard.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Actually, nuclear is a good match for vehicles.
If you read US Patent # 4,835,433, you'll see that a device about the size of a keg of beer will crank out about 7500 W for 29.1 years, if you put a small amount of Strontium-90 in it (one gram - about 2mm of 16 gauge wire worth of material). Since Strontium-90 is generally considered nuclear waste these days, it's very easy to "mine" it out of our current waste dumps. If you want something smaller, then something the size of a "D" battery will crank 75 W for the same amount of time.
Even if you don't want to carry it around with you (it emits only alpha and beta particles, not gamma, so it doesn't actually require heavy lead shielding), you can use the electricity generated to generate fuel for use in fuel cells, if you'd rather carry around something combustible with you, instead of a keg of beer with neck-bolts.
What really annoying about the whole nuclear fear in the U.S. is that it's really a very green source of energy. You get more radiation released into the atmosphere from a coal-fired plant, not to mention the sludge for your lungs to filter ut of the air. If the U.S. would follow the lead of France and Japan, and build breeder reactors, and did fuel cycling like Japan does, we could stop digging for more fuel (it'd be generated as a by product of the reactor running), and it'd never be in a form where it could be used to build a nuclear weapon.
-- Terry
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.
Just out of curiosity, I checked my last electricity bill. I run a fairly successful 'geek' household (no AC but in winters we get down to -22F so some heating is involved; no garage either, and I have a projector instead of plasma, but otherwise pretty much what you describe) and I seem to consume about 4 kWh per year. And I drive a nice, roomy Korean car which gets 24 mpg.
I don't doubt your estimates about the average Americans; I was just curious about it. Since we have cold winters, our building code requires considerable insulation and similar considerations (which of course jack up the cost of housing). I remodeled my apartment completely 4 years back and installed low energy versions of all household devices. I just traded my car down to one size smaller, because the top-of-the-line model a) was really really gas-hungry and b) it was a bitch to maneuver downtown Helsinki.
As I traded my car down, I also began to use fuel, which has 5% - the maximum allowed by law here - of alcohol in it. No modifications needed, but it's about 17 euro-cents per gallon more expensive than the lowest grade 95-octane. Which just hit 3.7 euros (= 4.7 US$) per gallon (so the bio-version is 3.87 euros per gallon)!
The points I'm meandering towards are thus: 1) it's quite possible, without much trouble or much investment at all, to decrease your yearly power consumption by a few kWh (or, "Americans seem to use twice what they'd need to for their lifestyle" ;-). And 2), myself, and most people here I know, would quite probably go for cow-dung/whatnot-greenish electricity if it was no more than about 5% more expensive than coal/nuclear originated. More than that would probably exceed our convenience level (none of the referred to people are environmentalists, just somewhat environmentally aware consumers).
New Belgium brewing http://www.newbelgium.com/sustainability.php not only uses wind turbines, but also harvests methane from their waste water used in brewing. Between the 2, they claim to be fully sustainable in energy, using zero fossil fuels.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I read an article about a family who installed enough solar energy panels to cover their yearly costs... or so they thought.
The math was simple, they added up their kwh and sized their system accordingly. Winters would be balanced by summers, etc. During the summer they'd build a credit with the power co. and during the winter they'd consume the credit. Their mistake was assuming that the power company would buy the power at the same price at which they sold it. The power company actually purchased at about 50% of the charge rate for the power. So, this family (after a good effort to live 'green') ended up with a power bill anyway.
This story is interesting because they're taking methane (which is 'free' as in 'sunk cost') processing it (probably with gov't subsidy) and charging the customer more for it.
I love the idea. It's efficient, and useful. However, I hate that the power co. is charging marginally more for the 'BS energy' (which is truly BS because the energy would be produced regardless of consumption).
Canada supplies a fair amount (for a single country), but by no means the "majority". According to 2002 figures, Canada supplies approximately 15% of the oil imported into the U.S (3rd largest importer behind Saudi Arabi at 16.9% and Mexico at 15.1%).
_ publications/petroleum_supply_monthly/current/pdf/ table37.pdf
Recent figures (April 2006) show Canada as the largest supplier for that month at a whopping 17.4%, followed by Mexico at 16.3%, and Saudi Arabia at 16.1%. Nearly half (49.4%) of our oil comes from OPEC countries. And even a non-OPEC country is not guaranteed to be stable or even friendly to the US. Also, when you buy oil from Canada there is no guarantee that it's actually Canadian oil. Some of it might have originated in Iran, Qatar, Venezuela, etc. A funny thing that "trade".
For the April 2006 figures, see here (PDF warning):
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data
I recently changed my plan here in Houston, Tx from Reliant Energy's standard plan to their 100% wind power. The difference in cost was negligable, maybe $5/month, and now my 2000-3000kw/h per month are totally green. They replace at least 100% of the energy I use with wind power. I figure this is about 2/3 of my total carbon footprint I have reduced in one swoop, and I have cast my vote for clean energy.