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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.
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.
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 ?
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No, it doesn't, because the carbon was recently removed from the atmosphere by the growing of the plants that the cows ate to produce the, um, fuel. OTOH, when we burn oil, we're bringing up carbon that was taken out of the atmosphere millions of years ago, and putting it back into the atmosphere instead of leaving it in the ground. The only way this isn't closer to carbon-neutral than burning oil is if the cow manure that is going to be burned for power would otherwise be buried deep underground, which I kind of doubt would happen.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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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
Feed the cows lots of beans.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
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.
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 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.
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It's true: the electrons are fungible. You're getting plain old electricity from the grid, and paying a premium which goes (more or less) to the cow people.
But the cow people won't produce it for the rates the electric company is willing to pay them. It's more expensive to produce a watt-hour of juice from cow-fart than it is from coal. Without the subsidy they're paid based on the fossil-fuel rates, and they lose money. This is a way for people to say, economically, "Non-fossil fuel power is more important to us than other uses of our money."
In the limit, enough people being willing to pay for it could reduce the amount of coal burned and replace it with methane-burning, which is marginally better for the environment. How much better, as you point out, is entirely debatable, especially relative to other energy-conserving uses of the money. Nonetheless the fact that power is fungible does not alter the fact that people subsidizing the cow-power reduces fossil fuel consumption.
(Or, more likely, reduces coal demand, lowering the price of conventionally-produced power, thus convincing people to leave the lights on all night. Or perhaps putting thousands of coal miners out of work. Or other horrible knock-on effects.)
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.
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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).
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
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.
The laws of thermodynamics aren't proved either. Evidence is examined, and tentative theories are formulated. Nothing is proved. Welcome to science.
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Being from Vermont, I think you have a skewed view of dariy farmers (in VT). I don't know about where you're from but most of the dairy farms here are small family owned business that have been operating for generations, and out of all of the ones I know, NONE of them have mansions. They all have small family farms, work long hours for low income and constantly worry about being able to do it again next year. They do it because they've always done it, because they love it, and its a vermont way of life. They don't do it to get rich, they do it to keep Vermont's agriculture industry alive.
What I see is a local family owned farm which was suffering the same fate as most of the other farms in the state (1-2 bad years from being broke and out of business) finding a unique way to increase their income (and be sustainable, hey novel idea), provide "green-power" in the state where there is a huge demand for it, and be kind to the environement.
These people don't own mansions, these people work hard, bust their ass all day long, and continue a tradition dating back generations, while at the same time doing good for the state, and the environment.
Now, it may not be efficient, but it is a good use of what was being wasted before. What exactly is the problem you have w/ it again?
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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.