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."
That idea really stinks!
Who would want to pay more for crappy power?
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.
Amazing that the Central Vermont Public Service web server handles a good Slashdotting better than virtually every other web server I've ever seen.
Viva le Cow Power!
While definetly greener than burning oil this still contributes as much to global warming? Right?
bull shit....
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
So long as it doesn't become the secret ingredient in their barn yard swirl I don't care.
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.
$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.
.... our cows must be tipped
I love humanity, it is people I hate
You like being taxed at 40%?
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.
Forrest Gump did this first.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
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
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 Chick-Fil-A spokescow just informed me that their "Eat mor chikin!" slogan will be replaced soon with a "Youse mor chikin powr!" slogan due to the cow's products be seized without remuneration.
-pentapenguin
MasterBlaster runs Maine.
But seriously, it's pretty cool that a utility is playing friendly with independent energy producers like this. I wonder if the individual farms are paid the premium rate for their renewable energy, or what the deal is.
+++ ATH0 +++
Feed the cows lots of beans.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Given the way market forces work, it wouldn't surprise me if this eventually fell to a price comparable with regular power, and stopped billing seperately. I mean, seriously, what else are they going to do with this stuff?
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
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.
dam, that stuff is nasty, so glad the poster was aware of it, more people need to know its effects
The Bush Administration emissions could power the entire planet!
(And who knew Al Gore had such incredible ecological foresight in not contesting the 2000 election?)
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."
I don't think the cows are gonna like this, what will they do on the weekends with nothing for mushrooms to grow in ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
...if it takes 10 calories of gasoline to make one calorie of crop, and that food is used to feed cows, which use more gasoline, this doesn't sound like too much of a sustainable bit of agriculture.
Of course, that gasoline would be used anyway in the production of these crops, milk, meat and byproducts, and that gasoline can be replaced by some other energy storage medium... but it seems to me that the onus is still on replacing gasoline and other fossil fuels, not burning whatever waste we can find and calling ourselves carbon nuetral-by-proxy.
That, and the removal of potentially massive ammounts of manure from our agricultural system doesn't sound like a sound investment in a sustainable agriculture either. But that's a consideration further down the path of long-term sustainability, and a fairly minor one in the current scope.
Ryan Fenton
With no idea about what this guy is actually doing, I can tell you that the house I live in right now uses about 1000 kWh/month during summer and up to 1500 kWh/month during winter. What the heck are we (it's 7 people by the way) using so it's that much ? Let's see...
1 "always-on" home server, ~0.2*24*30 = ~144 kWh/month
4 semi-used PCs, ~0.3*12*30 *4 = ~432 kWh/month
2 TVs (~4h/day), 2 refrigerators, 2 washing machines running almost non-stop during afternoons (spin cycle uses up alot of power), I can only assume that's even up to another 400-600 kWh/month
we stay up pretty late most of the time, so kitchen light and other lights in the house are on a long time each day (another ~50 kWh/month, or more)
And during winter (lighting power usage spikes too, as there's just not enough natural light), sometimes the normal heating just isn't enough, so we use electrical radiators when and where needed (the baby is especially sensitive to cold), so we really use up a lot of energy.
I could come up with a lot of other scenarios where a larger household or a small IT company would easily go beyond the 1MWh/month limit.
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Colorado requires the local utulity to sell wind and solar. They entered into agreements for all the power long ago. Now, the company is going to charge .1 more/watt than the oil does or the true costs of the energy, whichever is higher. But none of the extra will go to the alternative. IOW, they are not providing incentives to the generator.
Just like the monopoly for the net, we have issues with how we handle power distribution and generation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Who fact checked this story? It's udderly ridiculous.
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?
According to this page (found via google for "cost of electricity").
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html
"The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86/kWh in the U.S. in March 2006."
The fee charged by Cow Power is 4 cents per kilowatt hour. That makes the price almost, but not quite, 40% higher. The 4 cents also does NOT go to the farmers. That goes to Cow Power. The farmers presumably get market price for the electricity, minus a commission for Cow Power, presumably. Chances are, after the capital expenditures (cost of generators and methane collection equipment) and maintainence costs, they won't make any money on this either. Cow Power are presumably the only ones who would make money on this deal, since they seem to just be brokers for the selling of this power.
My other first post is car post.
And yes, they freely admit that it all mixes together in the power grid. But they buy power from the "green" providers based on the usage of the customers signed up for the program. This means they have to burn less fossil fuel to run their own generators.
If you are curious, you can look at their program information here
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill
Taking in arguments about the actual $/kWh cost to consumers along with notions of environmental foresight, it seems clear to me that technology like this should be subsidized. Plus wide adoption will naturally increase the efficiency of the technology, so the cost-to-subsidize will decrease over the years.
I'm all for alternative energy sources but this is a little nuts. Even if it really is only a few bucks more every month, I really don't want to "donate" money to my neighbors who are already pretty well off.
Granted not every farmer is sitting pretty, but most of the farmers I know that have the money to invest in methane-harvesting technology are alreaddy pretty wealthy. And this is just another way to get them higher up on the list.
I'm far more likely to support my farmers by going to the local Farmer's Market. At least then I'm helping a lot of different farmers, and not just the rich ones.
-David
Oh definitely. Imagine subsidising a power source.. the government putting vast amounts of money into an unsustainable business proposition. The only thing stupider than that would be to, hmm lets see, fight a war for such a resource when other resources could be used instead.
Imagine that, huh? what a waste of money (not to mention life)!
But seriously now, I've heard that the nuclear industry gets similar government rebates - can anyone quantify this? I suppose future governments having to deal with the waste could be seen as a government subsidy..
the Brownouts.
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
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).
"Slashdot: shit that matters"
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.eeggs.com/items/37085.html
I mean, think about it... this will change the face of Science Fiction forever...
I can just imagine it:
In Star Trek: Cows in Space -- "We've lost anti-manure containment... Ahhhh!!!"
Lameness ?!?
By reading this signature you agree to not disagree with the post you just read.
Feed the cows lots of beans.
I notice a lot of Taco Bell's next to power plants, and the seats are funny.
Table-ized A.I.
Leave it to us Americans to poop our way out of problems...
Table-ized A.I.
If you're paying 10 cents per kwh, then an added 4 cents is a 40% increase.
So in other words, take your annual electricity bill, add 40%, that's what you're now paying. Just for the 'benefit' of using cow shit.
Aha!
(OK, close.)
I don't think taxes are optional, this is premium, who knows, some people might want to pay money so they can crack jokes about anything being powered by shit.
how much power we could derive of this if we apply this tech to diablos cow level
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
What makes you think it was done for your benefit? I cannot understand how folk are confused by the price hike. Did you think it was done for you and that your cheque for share of the profits is in the post? ;-)
All of the people who contributed to the last two election campaigns (and who made the presidency possible) got what they wanted. You'll need to wait in line.
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.
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!
I summer in Vermont. My wife feeds me beer and has my ass hooked up to the grid. On a good day, I'm able to power a toaster.
*** Don't be dull.***
A small correction; Chernobyl happened because of very bad reactor design (the four reactors were RBMK reactors). It was inherently unstable. because it used water moderation, and as the water converted to steam, it had a runaway power increase (this is called a positive void coefficient), leading to the steam blowing the top off the building.
Reactors don't have to be built that way, and not all designs are intrinsically risky. For example, a Pebble bed reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor can't melt down, and is self-moderating due to neutron dopplering.
Even so, Japan, the only country which has ever had an atomic bomb dropped on it by a foreign power, has a lot more to fear from nuclear energy than the U.S., and they have 23 breeder reactors and 30 other reactors that commercially generate a little over 25% of Japans total electrical needs. Their current plans are to increase this by 30% by 2011 as part of their compliance with the Kyoto accords on CO2 emissions.
-- Terry
That means that this will quickly become a cheaper option as energy costs rise, seeing as it is at least in theory a renewable resource. Looks like we might be mooooooving to renewable energy sooner than I thought!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_6B6vwE83U
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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...
this whole scheme is just a lot of hot air
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Thank you. Yes, too many city boys here. I suspect almost all the "farms" that would install these facilities would be the massive cow factories. Bad in so many ways. It's a little like saying we could burn every book in every library to solve our energy "needs" and society would be the better for it in the trade-off.
Because they are becoming so inefficient in doing whatever that sooner they won't have anything that others want for a price others are willing to pay. In that case, it wouldn't hurt to be self-sufficient... :-)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Here is the issue with that reasoning, and why most people turn away from those statements and just ignore you:
1) You act as if there is a switch that the POTUS just have to flip and all of our energy problems would go away. Some would like to think that switch is the Kyoto Treaty, others would think it is hydrogen fuel cells... The point is, there is no switch. Nothing we do today, about alternative energy, is going to have a drastic effect tomorrow; it is going to take years, and nearly 99% of the population will welcome that day, but they are generally just being realistic about the situation.
2) We are talking about electricity powered by manure, but you segway into a political rant about war. Yes, we are war; war sucks, people die, however, you will likely get more attention to your opinions if don't act like everyone is stupid evil hate mongerers... because if you actually used rational thinking, you would realize that they aren't. This electricity has absolutely nothing to do with oil today. Electricity will only have something to do with oil when we are either running electric only vehicles or using sources of energy created from electical output. We aren't there and we won't be there for years. The rational connection would be "This feces power is great! Now, if we could find some more ways to produce excess electricity, we would have more incentive to get our vehicles to use it instead of oil!"
3) If you focused your attention toward creating more civility, you would have a better impact on society as whole. One can only assume (which can be a dangerous thing) that you would like to think your are a societal thinker; Act like it.
Here is the real deal. We are not going to be off of oil today. It is sad, because we have so many reasons to not use oil, but it is reality. Further, we will not be off of oil tomorrow, next year, next decade, or likely the decade after that; this is all sad for the same reasons, but further compounded by the effects of time.
So, what can be done? Get off of your butt and do something productive about it. Stop using so much energy. As much as you might like to rant, it is highly likely that you use a considerable amount of energy, but you are speaking as if you are on a pedestal of energy greatness. If you are comparable to the absolute vast majority of the civilized world, then you are using too much energy. Further, you are wasting energy sitting around whining about everybody else while you are not doing anything.
We need to keep working on alternative energy; that is quite simple to understand, and we are actually doing that. Private industrial is doing that, research groups are doing that, it is in the works... quite acting as if it isn't. We also need to diversify our current supply of oil. This is for economic and geopolitical reasons. That certainly does mean ANWAR. There is great debate about how much oil is available, and that a good thing. However, there is a point when debate gets in the way of productivity, and I think we have reached it. I am not going to debate it here, as it has been done ad nauseum. There is a potential for reduced demand on oil from places that we should not wish to send money; we ought to use it while we can. Further, we should all work to reduce our usage of energy. You seem to be among those who think we are doing nothing. I am going to disagree. We have a new tax credit that was put in place by our current Congress, with the advise of the current Administration (who is run by a guy who actually uses alternative energy in his real life... he doesn't play a guy, who does, on TV). This tax credit gives incentive to be energy efficient. Light bulbs, appliances, building materials, solar panels, hybrid vehicles... they are all part of it. Every light bulb in my house has been switched to CFL bulbs; we are in the process of buying a new front-load wash machine paired with a NG dryer with a moisture sensor as well as an on demand, tankless water heater; we are purchasing solar s
Politics, Life, and More on my Aspiring for the Future
How's it a tax? You're making a market decision. You can buy the bargain, cut rate 'power' from 'dirty' sources such as coal, nuclear, and hydro, or you can buy 'premium clean power' at .04 more than cut rate.
It's like buying LandoLakes's brand milk, or organic eggs or whatever versus store brand. You pay more, but most people can't tell the difference.
I don't read AC A human right
Who's going to make the choice to pay about 30% more for energy?
The same people who went out and bought hybrids the first year they came out and such?
People make uneconomical decisions all the time. Frankly, given that the total possible amount of 'cow power' is limited, keeping it a limited market is a good idea. Cow manure should be carbon neutral and such, hopefully it's burned clean, etc... But it's still limited market.
I don't read AC A human right
But seriously now, I've heard that the nuclear industry gets similar government rebates - can anyone quantify this? I suppose future governments having to deal with the waste could be seen as a government subsidy..
.13%, not a bad charge.
At least in the USA, all the government does for them is act as a forth level insurance underwriter. And they haven't had to pay out since TMI. It's the Price-Anderson act.
For 'cheap' incidents the companies insure themselves. For medium level events, like $300 million right now, they have individual insurance. After that, all the nuke reactor owners each pay $95.8 million($8.6 billion total), and the government still hasn't paid a dime. It's only after $8.9 Billion is paid by the nuclear industry that it's call a disaster and the federal government steps in.
Oh, and the $300 Million insurance only costs $400k a year.
I don't read AC A human right
Aside from the feeling-good that you are not supporting foreign oil, what incentive is there to pay more for alternative energy? Purely from an economical stance, there is no reason to support this, it costs more.
You succeeded. You stiffle economic growth with a subsidy ridden, high tax environment and make it impossible for young people to stay in the state. The only new residents of Vermont are New Yorkers with trophy homes that stand empty most of the year or retirees. Vermont has become an anachonism and charactature of an eden it never was. I have lived half of my life in New England and this peculariar "Hooterville" phenomenon makes Maine and Vermont steadily more unlivable. I have no doubt poor rural Vermonters would take big box stores.
an ill wind that blows no good
If this article doesn't get metatagged with "bullshit"
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+
It does not stink. Infact all the gases emitted by rotting maure are captured and thus it actually reduces stink of the dairy farms for the neighbors.
The manure has two componants. Combustible methane and non-combustible fertilizer. By separating the two, and organic, non-chemical fertilizer is available to the farms.
USA has 100 million cows. Six cows produce enough methane in a year to run one car for a year. There is potential to bump off 15 million cars off middle east oil into a fully renewable energy source. If you include pig and chicken wastes, we could cut middle east oil imports by 30 to 40%!! The key is using the CH4 for transportation, not electricity generation.
There are plenty of sources for electricity, coal, nuclear, wind, etc. But our transportation infrastructure is too heavily dependant on foreign oil. That dependance threatens both our security and prosperity.
Instead of trying to make electricity out of the cow-manure methane, Vermont should simply bottle it and supply it to bus/truck fleets. It should encourage conversion of farm machinery to run on methane.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This project should be moved to DC. We could power the entire country!
Please. Heating a house has nothing to do with America's dependency on foreign oil. Nearly all houses that don't use electricity directly for heating use natural gas, which is plentiful according to http://www.naturalgas.org/overview/resources.asp - 1090.997 Tcf (trillion cubic feet).
I feel kinda silly for commenting on this, but it's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, so here goes: despite being part of the canon of crazy high school hijinks, cow-tipping is not actually feasible, as far as I can tell. I grew up on a dairy farm, so I can attest to the facts that: 1. Cows DON'T SLEEP STANDING UP! 2. Being a prey species, they don't sleep very deeply, nor for very long. You can't walk into a pasture in the middle of the night without waking the entire herd; a crew of rowdy teenagers invading the meadow at night would tip them off (argh, unintentional pun) pretty quickly.
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).
Cow Power costs only 4 cents/kWh more than market price
Uhm, even after this month's amazing 72% electricity increase where I live (Thank you deregulation, "competition" really is better for me!), my price per kWh is 11.03cents. This 4 cent increase is 36% increase. My current bill is $153.78, and a 36% increase over that would have me paying $209.14. That's a little mroe than your $5 to $6/month increase. There's no natural gas available on my street, so the whole house is electric, including furnace, basement electric baseboard heating, water heater, clothes dryer, etc. And this is after I just spent $5700 on a new Air Conditioning system in an attempt to reduce my bill.
Last year this month I paid about $220 in electric with the old 8-SEER system, my new bill is my first month with the new 16-Seer system, with the same average outside temperature as this month last year. A 36% increase on the old system wouldhave had me paying $299.20 then, and would be $514.62 today considering our new 72% rate increase that took effect on my current billing statement. I'd be paying about $378.74 now if I'd kept the old AC system. (Yes, I think that $5700 will be well worth it in a couple years)
I don't think that the word "only" works well on a 36% rate hike compared to the new market price I'm now paying. You might have gas for everything other than your computer and TV, but there's a lot of people out there that would see huge monthly billing increases on this additional 4cents/kWh.
How is this possible?
This is shit with power!
AIMS Logistics
EDI Programmer
Univ of Memphis
B.B.A.
MIS
How long before someone either a) selectively breeds or b) genetically modifies cows that produce more "gas" and/or bigger cowpies? My bet is 2 to 3 years.
Sorry, hate to be a downer here, but a 4 cent subsidy from people who opt-in, isn't going to save small farms in VT. For example, my dad is calling it quits after a life of small dairy farming.
Energy subsidy won't raise milk prices, increase production, or cut the price of diesel. Running a 3-Phase variable speed milk vacuum pump will go a lot further on the bottom line.
It all sounds good though.
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.
"why does it smell like farts every time i turn on a light?"
How can all those vegans up in vermont be against "exploiting" animals but for burning their manure? Screw them, lets just go nuclear allready, dammit.
What they should really call this is "Pay for power scheduling to allocate the use of more green power." instead of making it sound like you, yourself, will be using green power.
Power is power when it hits the lines - electrons can't be distinguished from one another. So, yes, you're paying the power company to have their schedulers and power traders to work with cow-power plants instead of Natural Gas or Coal Fired plants - your power is whatever hits your home.... a mix of everything.
The only way to ensure you're on green power is buy solar panels and a battery system and disconnect from the grid.
You can invent whatever strawman arguments you want to shadowbox with. I said none of what you're claiming. I said only that we're wasting a huge amount of money in Iraq, and implied we should be unhappy about that. That we'd be happier spending the money on something like cow power.
People like you who will pretend that Bush "uses alternative energy" because he bikes or somesuch insignificant activity on his part will "turn away from my statements and just ignore me" because you're CRAZY. You will say anything, no matter how nonsensical, to cover up your guilt. You think buying 225W in solar panels over the next 5 years will compensate for that SUV you drove, the tax breaks that paid for it? You're living in a fantasyland. You're a "concern troll", who cares nothing for whether people listen to me, except that they listen to you instead.
You voted for Bush/Cheney, the oil screwups who hustled into power on the kinds of lies you apparently live on. Like your hunger for the too little/late ANWR that you can't even spell, let alone justify - it's just another buzzword you heard on Rush Limbaugh junkie radio.
The actual reality, the kind we all live in together, that you can touch and measure, not the kind you create with your delusions in your medium of choice, is that most Americans have realized we've put the foxes in charge of the henhouse. That we've already done so much damage that there are few, if any, good options. That Bush/Cheney and their cheering section has squandered so much American resources that we'll take generations to recover, if ever. That change has come partly from people like me who don't let people like you just spin your lies unopposed. Which has gradually used the power of the truth against the power of your media, greed and unmitigated selfishness.
You're losing, no matter how you care to spin it. Even when you were winning you were losing, because you were destroying our country. Now your hideous dream is falling apart, and people like me who never believed it because we live in reality are picking up the pieces. I already use much less than the national average of energy (less than 1/4). As I have for years, with a pretty lush lifestyle. You're trying to catch up with how I live with relatively low impact. Just try to stop alienating the sensible people like me who've been doing this for years with your lies, attacks, nonsense and public ignorance. You've got a lot to learn. Start acting like you've already learned a minimum required to act like a real person.
--
make install -not war
I was curious about how the 1.75 million kWH produced by a single 1500-cow farm stacked up, so I checked the Hoover Dam - that facility produces "over 4 billion kWH," or roughly the output of 2285 such farms. So, how many of these bovine bioreactors do they have in Vermont? According to the Vermont State House of Representatives, there were 160,000 dairy cows in the state in 2001. If they were all participating in the project (an unattainable goal, unless the technology can scale to the individual cow), it would still be less than 5% of the output of the Hoover Dam, at 186 million kWH.
But we need more distributed, small sources of power like this. This 5% plus another 5% from solar rooves and another 5% from landfill gas and another 5% from windmills and another 5% from tidal power and another 5% from somewhere else...that's lots of redundancy, and lots of hands-on, local knowledge of how to produce power, that would secure the energy supply if widespread.
A failure or, sadly, an attack could take out power to over a million people if it shut down the Hoover Dam. If one dairy's local methane power plant goes out temporarily in a world where nearly everything is used as a source of energy, it's no big deal (well, except to the farmer who's losing money every minute he's out of operation, and that's a motivation to every power producer to keep things going).
that oil won't run out over night, as it gets more expensive, more and more financial resources will be put into alternative sources.
Bear in mind that billion are already going into alternative research. There may be NO alternative to oil.
Which means everything will change.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OTOH, if stopped enslaving cows, they would all die.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
come from questionable sources.
Next up, using high times articles as 'facts'.
Find some place less biased.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you're interested in reducing dependence on foreign oil, what you need is an alternate source of vehicle fuel. Alternate sources for electricity generation don't do much there, because we generate very little of our electricity from oil to begin with---the biggest source of U.S. electricity is burning domestically-mined coal. As far as I can tell, burning methane that cows produce to generate electricity is not somehow going to magically reduce the use of gasoline in cars.
Now there's surely an environmental argument that burning coal isn't too good, but it's not a geopolitical argument and has nothing to do with the middle east.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
What's the point? If you pay 4 cents more per KWH, you have to produce 4 more cents for each KWH used, which translates into less efficiency and more pollution all around.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
because yours are stupid
Reference Nutrient Intakes for Iron, mg/day
Age RNI Age RNI
0 to 3 months 1.7 mg
4 to 6 months 4.3 mg
7 to 12 months 7.8 mg
1 to 3 yrs 6.9 mg
4 to 6 yrs 6.1 mg
7 to 10 yrs 8.7 mg
Men 11 - 18 yrs 11.3 mg
Men 19 + yrs 8.7 mg
Women 11 - 49 yrs 14.8 mg
Women 50 + yrs 8.7 mg
Sources of Iron (single servings)
Chick peas (200g or 7oz) 6.2 mg
Bran flakes (45g or 1½oz) 5.3 mg
Spinach, boiled (100g or 3½oz) 4.0 mg
Baked beans (225g or 8oz) 3.2 mg
Black treacle (35g or 1¼oz) 3.2 mg
Muesli (60g or 2¼oz) 2.76mg
4 Dried figs (60g or 2oz) 2.1 mg
8 Dried apricots (50g or 1¾oz) 2.1 mg
Egg, boiled 1.3 mg
Asparagus (125g or 4¾oz) 1.1 mg
Avocado (75g or 2¾oz) 1.1 mg
1 slice wholemeal bread (40g) 1.0 mg
Broccoli, boiled (100g or 3½oz) 1.0 mg
Brown rice (200g or 7oz) 0.9 mg
Peanut butter (20g or ½oz) 0.5 mg
Banana (120g or 4¼oz) 0.48 mg
Yoghurt (150g or 5½oz) 0.36 mg
Cow's milk (½ pint) 0.14 mg
Hard cheese (30g or 1oz) 0.12 mg
Margarine (7g or ¼oz) 0.02 mg
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The people there have a birthrate FAR below replacement. Saying that a couple of young men living together in a tiny apartment in Manhattan use less energy than a family of five living in the burbs is rather meaningless. Those couple of guys either have to move out of their hole in the wall or we go extinct. Also, NYC cannot provide its own food, energy, materials etc. That Iowa farmer with the F350 isn't just driving it for himself - he is driving it for you.
High-density living is probably more energy efficient on the whole (due to public transport and smaller homes) but not as much as you are estimating.
I don't give much credit for planting trees, unless you bought the land and converted it from something else to forest. Trees will grow on their own if you let them.
My carbon offsets for my vehicle are independant of my green electricty program. I pay someone to offset my truck's carbon (actually, I overpay, according to their statistics). It is of no matter to me how they do it, as long as they do. As for my electricity, my company purchases green power with the money I pay them. Because of this program, they are installing a number of wind generators right now in part of my state.
Moderation -1
30% Troll
30% Interesting
20% Flamebait
TrollMods apparently love it so much, they can't get enough of it.
--
make install -not war
What the hell are you talking about? NYC is the oldest and the largest city in America. It's absolutely sustainable. In fact, we sustain the rest of the country with our hard work. That Iowa farmer is getting back about $1.11 for every dollar they send to Washington, while I'm getting back about $0.72 - the rest goes to Iowa and the rest of the Welfare States we're subsidizing. Since we've got all the people, and they've got so few, we're supporting quite a lot of those freeloaders. They'd better be driving that F350 for me. Especially since my gas costs so much more than theirs, though mine comes right off the ship, right out of the NJ refinery, and theirs comes across the prairie in trucks, heating their homes through their endless winters. That prairie that NYC spent centuries populating through subsidies and management - that they're blowing in just a few generations.
High density living is certainly more energy efficient. Especially in NYC, where we are smarter, so we live more efficiently. Not only do we use mass transit and walk (look at how goddamn fat those Iowans are, on our welfare), but we prepare food centrally too, in restaurants, which are much more efficient in every phase.
And the trees I planted were planted in deforested areas where trees weren't growing on their own, though people had "let them" without results for years.
Who cares what credit you give? You've found one of the weirdest venues for homophobia I've seen, ornamented with being totally wrong about everything. I bet you voted for Bush. You have no business talking as if you had a clue about reproduction, energy, economics, New York City or anything else. Go entertain your friends with your ignorance - in NYC we don't have time for it.
--
make install -not war
The primary reponsibility of an engineer is to know what happens when things go wrong and plan for them.
In that reguard, this post was absurd. While the medical costs of coal miners and oil rig workers is high, the risks for everyone else in coal generated and gasoline power and is mostly limited to accidental suffication from car exhaust and climate change. Labelling the well known medical dangers of a gas powered car anywhere near the long term effects of strontium is the "crazy" part, sir.
You ever see a car explode on impact? I haven't. The worst I've seen is when a F1 driver took off before his gas line was detached, resulting in a firey spray, a short burn off on gasoline on the car, and a couple of poor burn victims. The ER people were fine, most of the driver's crew was okay. The crew in the next pit over was fine. The crew in that station on the next race suffered on ill effects. Gasoline mostly doesn't explode. Only when you've refined it with a good mixture of oxygen and gasoline mist does it even come close.
Contrast this with what happens when you put substantial fissile material in a car. Strontium is dangerous because it's chemically similar to Calcium (hence the bone cancer stuff - it replaces calcium in your bones then decays). If any of this leaks out in a collision, the driver and passengers suffer the usual impact trauma, and instead of the somewhat rare likelyhood of fire, you're now threatened with an invisible specter. Moreover, emergency response crews are subjected to the same stuff, and unless it's cleaned up, the site remains contaminated with the stuff, and seeps into the groundwater as rains come in. And god forbid these things end up in the creek bed like idiots with worn tires try. To quantify these potential social costs as "all but free" is ludicrious, and the implicit suggestion that this would be cheaper than gasoline systems simply takes the cake.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
'Begging the question' is different from 'asking the question.' See Wikipedia for more information.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
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.
Ben and Jerry's should shut down if they care that much for the environment.
Making ice cream in Vermont and shipping it all over the country and keeping it cold and frozen that whole time emits enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.
It's not as if somebody else would just fill the void - Ben & Jerry's tastes so good people will eat it even when regular ice cream just isn't appealing.
Oh, you meant, anything else they could do as long as it doesn't affect profitability too much; capitalism is great, let's just not pretend it isn't.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)