Farm Power

"23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism"

2012-01-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

I bought this book by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang a while back after reading some reviews online; with the paperback coming out in two weeks, we should see another round of comments soon. Written after the 2008 financial crisis, "23 Things" is a crisp read that hammers home its message that economics is about good policy, not using reverence to the free market to accept bad outcomes.

As a renewable-energy entrepreneur frustrated by our nation's lack of a plan to power itself while we continue to deplete our resource base AND spend billions buying from overseas, this book was a breath of fresh air. Our society isn't doing much to prevent the next financial crisis, either, but "23 Things" carefully places the blame in the proper place--with the policymakers rather than the free market to which many profess their devotion.

I've put together a selection of points from six of the "Things" that support my contention that the United States needs to get serious about domestic production of renewable energy equipment and capacity, using government policy to drive this production as quickly as possible:
Thing 1. There is no such thing as a free market
"Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them." We accept that we aren't allowed to buy and sell human organs, unapproved drugs, or court decisions; other rules can be made to further policy goals, rather than simply accepting outcomes and crediting the "invisible hand".
Thing 7. Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich
"With only a few exceptions, all of today's rich countries, including Britain and the US--the supposed homes of free trade and free market--have become rich through the combinations of protectionism, subsidies, and other policies that today they advise the developing countries to avoid." China's explosive economy, with all its government controls and restrictions, resembles the United States during its late-19th-century growth into the world's richest nation; we don't necessarily have to play by different rules today, and we certainly shouldn't force desperate countries in crisis to do so.
Thing 9. We do not live in a post-industrial age
"It looks as if we are spending ever higher shares of our income on services not because we are consuming ever more services in absolute terms but mainly because services are becoming more expensive in relative terms." We buy more goods than ever, but more rapid productivity growth in manufacturing means goods are also cheaper than ever; we can pretend that these goods are destined to made elsewhere, or we can work to retain our vital manufacturing sector.
Thing 12. Governments can pick winners
"Decisions that are good for individual firms may not be good for the national economy as a whole." Especially in East Asia, the development of heavy industry (which has succeeded at the expense of the United States) was driven by governments rather than private business; the narrower and shorter-term focus of American businesses mean they can't and won't compete.
Thing 17. More education in itself is not going to make a country richer
"What really matters in the determination of national prosperity is not the educational levels of individuals but the nation's ability to organize individuals into enterprises with high productivity." Even if every worker in America graduates from college, it won't matter if they all end up working in finance and health care while we buy goods made elsewhere.
Thing 19. Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies
"Modern capitalist economies are made up of large, hierarchical corporations that plan their activities in great detail.... Therefore, the question is not whether you plan or not. It is about planning the right things at the right level." No corporation would operate completely guided by fluctuating market prices, so we shouldn't expect society to do so either.

I wrote almost two years ago about the energy overhaul needed in the United States; with energy usage on the rise again and oil prices increasing, we need good policy more than ever.

Abundance and Industrial Solutions

2011-11-23T21:45:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving provides an appropriate occasion for more thoughts on food waste. Of course, it's our everyday patterns--not our feasts--that should determine how we deal with waste, so here is my own food story.

Once or twice each day, I put four teaspoons of ground coffee into an unbleached filter and make a half-pot of coffee. The next time around, I have to dispose of a wet filter full of depleted grounds weighing several ounces. While one day I might toss an apple core and the next some lettuce scraps, the coffee filters are my heaviest and most consistent waste stream, one that for some time was going straight to the landfill.

Why didn't I use a recycling service? Waste Management charges $100 a year to pick up a green waste bin. It's not hard to find ways to dispose of grass clippings and I have no desire to add to the profits of a multi-billion dollar company (new motto: "Think Green") when they already make $200 a year disposing of my garbage; so, for years I tossed my food waste in the trash bin.

A little over a year ago, I shifted my habits--not with any new service or source of information online, but with two simple tools I'd noticed others using. I set up a common back-yard composting bin, and purchased a beautiful vented stainless-steel pail for food scraps. Now I put each day's coffee filters in the pail, along with bits of fruit and vegetable waste. The pail sits on the counter next to the coffee maker, breathing through its filters and avoiding the odor that can result when the process of biological breakdown starts prematurely indoors. Every couple days, I go out to the back yard with a food-scraps pail and my favorite four-tine garden fork. I open the top hatch, through which I've been loading compost bin for the last year. I re-mix partially-decomposed previous layers of organic material, add in fresh food waste, and cover over with wilted grass clippings. The middle of the bin continues to cure, but I'll dig out the compost at the bottom through the side hatch and put it into the garden next spring in lieu of a branded bag of material purchased at a big-box store.

Now I don't need another huge truck getting four miles per gallon roaring up to my curb every week or two. I don't need to pay another utility bill for the privilege of sending away food I already paid for to be turned into compost that someone can try to sell back to me later. Better yet, I'm much more aware of the flows of organic material through the kitchen and the yard.

Our industrial economy expends huge amounts of effort and diesel moving material around. As long as green waste recycling is treated as only marginally different than our current model of paying to make stuff disappear, it lacks long-term sustainability. Our developed-world level of wealth allows us the luxury of not thinking about waste beyond the comforting thought that someone else is recycling a bit of it.

It is ridiculous to package food, distribute it, bring it home, fail to eat it, haul it away from the home, and then finally try to salvage all this wastefulness by recovering a bit of energy or fertilizer. If we really value renewable electricity and soil amendments, we could take a cue from Europe and just skip the whole wasting-food step altogether. The Germans harvest two million acres of food-grade crops every year and feed them straight to anaerobic digesters, producing over a gigawatt of electricity and building up their soils at the same time. Or we could work to make our waste volumes as small as possible and process them with equally small-scale backyard or neighborhood-level systems. The savings, and the sustainability, would slowly but surely grow in abundance.

Farm Power Rexville Open House

2011-10-28T16:00:00.000-07:00

Three years ago was a beautiful October day in Northwest Washington, a perfect day to break ground on our first manure-to-energy project. Today the weather is miserable, but at Farm Power Rexville the digester bacteria are happily making biogas in their 100F slurry environment. While after years of operation we often take our manure bacteria for granted, we want to celebrate their hard work with an open house; we know many of you have already seen the digester, but as always--you’re invited!

The facility will be open from 10 AM to noon next Saturday, November 5th, at 18866 Beaver Marsh Road, Mount Vernon—here is Google map of the digester location. Please come, bring shoes that can get dirty, and any more questions you may have.

In other news, the USDA finally announced this year's Renewable Energy for America Program awards, and our two Oregon projects made the cut. The green power industry is looking at a few lean years coming up, but we are thankful for the opportunity to get a couple more digesters in the ground while we can.

Seattle Times on Farm Power

2011-06-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

The deputy business editor from the Seattle Times came up to Rexville a few weeks ago, and the resulting story came out today. The video attached to the story (also available here) combines nice views of Skagit Valley's tulip fields while I talk about the value of manure in an agricultural system! The Times also created a great visual representation of the digester, which I've attached at left.

Why go electric?

2011-03-26T20:43:00.000-07:00

I spent another $50 earlier this week to have the Toyota dealership service my Prius. Normally, this doesn't bother me too much, but the charge came just after finding the "Service" section of the Tesla Roadster entry while browsing Wikipedia:

Electric vehicles require much less service and maintenance than internal combustion engine vehicles. They do not require routine oil changes. They do not have any tailpipe emissions and therefore do not require any muffler or exhaust system work. They do not require replacement spark plugs, pistons, hoses or belts. The conventional parts of the car—including the brakes, body work and any interior and HVAC work—can be performed by any qualified automotive technician.

I already know that I can't fit into a Tesla Roadster, but the Model S could be my option for breaking free of auto maintenance costs forever. That, and instant torque propelling a sedan from 0-60 in 5.6 seconds!

Rainier Biogas gets carbon offset support courtesy of NativeEnergy

2011-03-22T13:33:00.000-07:00

SOUTH BURLINGTON, Vt., March 22, 2011 — A project in Washington State will support local dairy farms and reduce approximately 4,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. eBay, Stonyfield Farm, Brita, and Effect Partners are enabling this project through the purchase of NativeEnergy’s "Help Build" carbon offsets.

Conventionally, manure storage on dairy farms results in the release of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than CO2, into the atmosphere. The Rainier Farm Biogas Project in Enumclaw, WA, will avoid this pollution through the construction of a manure digester.

Three family-owned farms will feed their manure to the sealed, heated system. None of the farms is large enough to support a digester by itself, but through collaboration, they can jointly support it. The digester will capture and burn the methane to produce electricity in a 1-megawatt electric generator, which will deliver renewable energy to the region’s electrical grid.

The developer, Rainier Biogas LLC, turned to NativeEnergy to help provide financing for the project. By selling the carbon reductions that will result from the digester, NativeEnergy was able to provide critical upfront funding for construction. Through NativeEnergy’s innovative "Help Build" carbon offsets, eBay, Stonyfield Farm, Brita, and Effect Partners were able to purchase a share of the verified emissions reductions that the project will produce over a 10-year period.

Jeff Bernicke, President of NativeEnergy, said: “This project shows that, through a cooperative effort, our "Help Build" carbon offsets bring new carbon reduction projects on line.

Kevin Maas of Rainier Biogas, the project developer, noted: “Everyone in the community will benefit from this project. It will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, protect the area’s sensitive rivers and streams, and provide low-cost bedding for local farmers.”

To learn more, view the Rainier project page.

About Native Energy

NativeEnergy is a leading provider of verified carbon offsets and renewable energy credits. NativeEnergy’s "Help Build" carbon offsets help finance the construction of Native American, family farm, and community-based carbon reduction projects. For more information, visit: www.nativeenergy.com.

About Rainier Biogas

Plugging into the century-old dairy community nestled at the foot of Mount Rainier, Rainier Biogas is the third anaerobic manure digester developed in Western Washington by Farm Power Northwest. The two previous projects improve manure handling on partner farms while each producing up to 750kW of electricity. Rainier Biogas is proud to commit to more long-term investment and cooperation with the family-run dairy farms in the Pacific Northwest. For more information, visit www.farmpower.com.

CONTACT:  NativeEnergy Contact:
     Thomas H. Rawls
     VP, Sales & Marketing
     802-861-7707 x215
     tom.rawls@nativeenergy.com

     Rainier Biogas Contact:
     Kevin Maas
     360-424-4519
     farmpowernw@gmail.com

The Continuing Reign of Finance?

2011-01-16T21:58:00.000-08:00

I graduated from Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) with an MBA in sustainable business three and a half years ago. Farm Power was only a few months old, and one of our biggest hurdles was raising capital. While I had discussed this extensively with other interested classmates, our education hadn't focused much on finance--with the notable exception of one spectacular Entrepreneurship class, we had spent little time on the mechanics of debt, securities, and such.

Today, Farm Power has perfected its formula for funding capital-intensive projects, borrowing millions of dollars from sustainable banks while raising equally large amounts from investors and grants. I haven't kept up with the curriculum at BGI, but I have noticed that guest speakers these days are definitely trending towards finance. Unfortunately, it appears that most of the topics end up being on the service side of the industry--analysis, wealth management, and such. And all I can think of is: "None of this really matters!"

It probably sounds strange to hear this, so let me explain: what I see is an economy with vast amounts of money sloshing back and forth, try to cheat basic laws of physics and biology. New sources of energy or sustenance can't be conjured out of thin air, so finance turns to speculating in derivatives of the tangible. The simple existence of hedge funds and their manager compensation norms is evidence enough that there is no shortage of capital willing to pay obscene fees for a chance to cut corners on actual wealth creation. Meanwhile, creating sustainable new sources of food, electricity, or transport is hard, risky, and requires a long-term view.

What this world needs is not another level of money managers or more analysis of mutual funds or even another investment bank; what it needs is more people working to create long-term value that is actually worthy of financing. Our system of worshiping at the temple of finance may or may not be beyond help, but there are ways for truly good ideas to access capital and investors who want to provide it.

What about our own waste?

2010-12-08T20:26:00.001-08:00

After dozens of posts, readers may be growing impatient with my focus on dairy cow manure. So, for a change of pace, I turn to pondering the organic waste that comes out of own homes--the majority of it food waste but also excrement. This potential energy leaves by two main routes--the sewer system (from both toilets and sink disposals) and the garbage system. In rough terms, each American dumps and flushes a pound of "fuel" every day, to be dispersed in sewage-treatment plants and landfills. I say dispersed because although both wastewater-treatment plants and landfills can be designed to capture some of the energy in garbage and sewage, their main goal is to make waste go away. And the material that arrives at these plants is already heavily diluted by water or inert solids, so energy production remains inefficient.

But what if we diverted all this organic waste--perhaps sending it in special pipes to small, energy-producing local digesters? One pound per person per day, converted into biogas, can be burned to produce about one kilowatt-hour of electricity--with enough extra heat (left over after warming the digester) to bring five gallons of water to a comfortable temperature for showering. Unfortunately, the typical American needs about twelve kilowatt-hours for household use, along with similarly excessive amounts of heat.

So there, in short, is why I focus on dairy manure: it produces far more energy than the farms could ever use and involves a lower "yuck factor" than what we dump and flush!

Lynden Approaching Completion

2010-10-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

Four months after we broke ground, our Lynden digester project is almost ready to come online. The Bellingham Herald ran a story on our progress (and a great photo of guys from Andgar working on the flare). There are also a lot more pictures in the Whatcom Farm Friends photo galleries on the project.

Spreading the word

2010-09-26T17:25:00.000-07:00

In a few weeks, I'll be leaving the Pacific Northwest (for the first time in almost a year!) to go speak about the Farm Power experience. On October 18th, I will be joining hundreds of bioenergy professionals in Des Moines for the BioCycle "Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling" conference. BioCycle magazine provides regular coverage of the digester industry along with composting and other types of waste recycling, so they draw a wide audience and we hope that BioCycle will bring this conference to our region in the future--by then we hope to have many more projects to talk about.

Meanwhile, our friends at NW Farms & Food recently wrote an story on our progress; like all the articles on the website, this one combines depth with clarity, but it also managed to capture the genesis of Farm Power better than I'd ever heard it expressed--with one of my quotes, no less!

"I was thinking about manure digesters [in 2004], but I figured that by the time I could do anything, half the farmers in the county would already be working on their own project. Lo and behold a year later — nothing. Nothing at all!”

“So that’s when we headed down this path,” he said. “If nobody was doing it, yet it was clear that it could be done, that it should be done, then we just had to figure out a better way to do it!”

And we continue to work every day to get digesters built throughout the Pacific Northwest, coming up with little innovations that--unexceptional by themselves--add up to real renewable energy projects that otherwise wouldn't happen. Construction on Farm Power Lynden is nearly complete, and regular readers know we're pushing forward on other biogas installations. I'll try to post a little more often this fall to keep spreading the word online as well as on the road.

Summer in the manure business

2010-08-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

While many people slow down a bit during the summer, we at Farm Power have been steadily accelerating. Our builder Andgar has added a photo page for our Lynden project, showing the rapid construction progress there. It appears likely that our second digester will be completed in half the time it took to build the first one--it helps to build during the summer rather than starting in November!

We've also been getting out in the community a bit, finally attracting the attention of business/tech website Xconomy after giving an update at the Northwest Energy Angels summer social. And two different websites dedicated to spreading good ideas have Farm Power material: NWCleanTech--a new site focused on "connecting regional innovation"--added Farm Power to its list of featured Pacific Northwest companies and also put us on their cool interactive map, while a member of Planet Forward--a project from George Washington University--put together a multi-media post called "Visiting an Anaerobic Methane Digester" after touring the Rexville facility.

Speaking of tours, we've scheduled one more tour for Saturday, August 21st. We'll be meeting at 11am by the picnic shelter next to the Rexville Grocery, giving a little overview, and then proceeding to the digester. Afterwards, I look forward to relaxing back at the Rexville's mini-restaurant and continuing to discuss renewable energy; we're still raising money for a little while longer, so come get your questions answered.

Further growth at Farm Power

2010-07-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

Last year around this time, we still had yet to fill our first digester's tank with manure; how things have changed. Now--besides all the operating experience from running Farm Power Rexville near Mount Vernon--our second digester is under construction, our third project has been financed and is in permitting, and we just received a $1 million grant from the Oregon Department of Energy for a Tillamook installation! The Tillamook region features dozens of medium-sized farms that pasture extensively in a temperature environment. It's an ideal location for one of our multi-farm community digesters. We've been talking to area farmers for over a year and are happy to be able to move forward; some locals have been happy to hear about us as well and we quickly received good coverage in the Ti llamook Headlight-Herald.

To help us fund this rapid expansion, we are going back out to our supporters to raise more equity--by selling ownership units in Farm Power. For angel investors, we've been posting information on AngelSoft and we can take money from accredited investors anywhere in the United States. However, we are most excited about our ability to accept investment from a broad swathe of Washington State residents through a small public offering; an info sheet on the offering can be found at our company homepage. Anyone interested in further information can request our offering circular by contacting us or writing to invest@farmpower.com. One of the best ways to understand what we do is to attend one of our upcoming tours, currently scheduled for 10am on Saturday July 24th and 2pm on Tuesday July 27th--we update the schedule regularly at http://www.farmpower.com. We have gotten great support from our current members, and we look forward to expanding the Farm Power membership.

A digester in action

2010-07-05T20:20:00.000-07:00

As Farm Power grows, we keep meeting more and more people who have heard of what we do but have never seen a manure digester; we'd like to start changing that.

First, we recently posted a YouTube video hoping that our maintenance work could get on the legendary Discover Channel show "Dirty Jobs". Mike Rowe has already done a show involving a manure digester, but we're sure working at ours would be more fun!

Back in March, a local television station did a five-minute segment giving a the best video overview to date of the Rexville project; they also took some footage at the Lynden site, but only a greenhouse was visible at that point so we'll have to wait for another segment to cover our second project.

Finally, for those who want to see manure-to-energy in person, we've scheduled a tour for Wednesday July 14th. We'll be meeting at 2pm by the picnic shelter next to the Rexville Grocery, giving a little overview, and then proceeding to the digester. Since the actual experience can be a bit smelly, don't hit the tour on the way to an important social event, but we do encourage anyone interested to come. Give us a call or send us an E-mail if you have any questions.

Farm Power Lynden Construction Underway

2010-06-30T19:07:00.000-07:00

Excavation has finally begun on our second digester; nine months after Andgar completed our Rexville project, their team is going back to work on a similar but slightly bigger manure-to-energy plant. We celebrated this important step with a groundbreaking ceremony--almost a hundred farmers, community members, and supporters joined us at the site on a gray but pleasant afternoon.

After people had a chance to get some refreshments, we had a short program. Whatcom County Executive Pete Kremen spoke about the importance of agriculture; we were also joined by 42nd-District Representatives Kelli Linville and Doug Ericksen as well as Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike and Lynden Mayor Scott Korthuis. Our regional USDA Rural Development business program representative Sharon Exley talked about building the funding package for the project through the REAP program. Next, we emphasized the importance of Puget Sound Energy and its Green Power program both in our comments and those by PSE's Tom Maclean. Finally, we invited up a whole line of project partners and turned over some shovelfuls of earth!

Whatcom Farm Friends added an event page for the groundbreaking to their project photo album--it already had greenhouse pictures, and Farm Friends will soon start adding construction photos. A reporter from the Bellingham Business Journal wrote a nice little story on the event, and other coverage included an article at the Biomass Magazine website as well as extensive re-printing of the press release from Puget Sound Energy.

We would like to extend our appreciation to everyone who helped us get to groundbreaking--it's taken two years, but the project is underway and very exciting! Stay tuned for further reports.

Lynden Groundbreaking June 28th

2010-06-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two years since we started exploring manure-to-energy possibilities in Whatcom County, and about a year since we started committing money to a project. So we're thrilled to finally announce groundbreaking on the Farm Power Lynden digester--we'll be having a ceremony on Monday, June 28th at 2pm. The photo above looks from the corner of our site towards the greenhouse we'll be supplying with hot water. You can see what Whatcom Farm Friends wrote about the project in its most recent newsletter here; give us a call at (360) 424-4519 or drop us a note at farmpower (at) gmail.com for more details--everyone's invited to the event.

CHP Update

2010-05-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

Well ahead of my once-a-year pace of writing about combined heat and power (CHP), it's already time for another blog posting on the subject. An updated combined heat and power database shows additions in Washington state during the past two years: a couple manure digesters and a small wastewater treatment plant started running engines on biogas, while a landfill is producing upgraded renewable natural gas and a paper mill now burns its waste for process heat and electricity.

Farm Power Rexville keeps running steadily, so not much news to add there. But manure-to-energy continues to be a favorite media topic: a cow-powered data center concept by Hewlett-Packard engineers got lots of attention. While the overall concept isn't news to us, the paper also described cooling with waste heat from engine-generators by "silica gel-water adsorption chillers" which "can be driven by near-ambient temperature heat."

The diagram above shows an elegantly-integrated system capable of providing electricity, heat, and cooling at higher efficiency than anything else I've seen. A boiler allows optimizing of heat output or upgrading hot water to steam. Even if other renewable energy technologies struggle for traction as the era of stimulus draws to a close, the future of ever-smarter CHP gets brighter and brighter.

Clean Heat and Power

2010-05-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

I recently heard Stan Gent of Seattle Steam speak about the importance of centralizing heat production, as his company does for buildings in downtown Seattle. One comment stuck with me: if we electrify transportation, we are doing something more important than just shifting emissions from millions of small exhaust pipes to a few bigger power plants--we are actually radically shifting waste heat from our highway to central locations where it can be put to use.

The concept of cogeneration--producing both electricity and usable heat--is not new; I wrote about it last year, mainly focusing on the decades-old practice of wood-products plants burning their waste for process heat and power. In the Northwest, such plants already produce as much renewable energy as the region's entire wind industry. However, I believe that vastly-more-widespread cogeneration must play an integral future role in increasing our efficiency--and sustainability. Combined heat and power (CHP) recovers 60-80% of the energy in its fuel; car engines run at only about 20% efficiency. At some point in the coming years, we will no longer have the luxury of wasting 80% of the energy we put into our fuel tanks.

Because CHP uses fuel so much more efficiently than typical power plants, the industry has begun calling it "clean heat and power", or when some of the heat runs an absorption chiller, "clean cooling, heat, and power". Even when burning natural gas rather than biomass, CHP is indeed one of the cleanest options in our energy portfolio. Imagine the effect if that sustainable electricity can be used to replace the combustion of diesel, gasoline, or even biofuel: moving all that heat off the highways, into businesses and even homes that need it, is exactly the kind of radical shift we need for the 21st century.

Tulip Time Again

2010-04-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

The Skagit Valley Tulip Festival is in full swing, complete with clogged roads extending back onto Interstate 5. That makes it a little tougher for us to get out to check on our digester, but on the other hand we get to see fields of color every time we do go--a great combination that also attracted PSE's Andy Wappler last week. Maybe next year we'll do some sort of tulip-themed tour, showing off Skagit Valley to best effect.

Stimulus and Infrastructure Impact

2010-03-30T18:00:00.000-07:00

Anaerobic digesters are remarkably flexible machines. They can process most types of manure, a wide variety of food wastes, almost any green vegetation--in short, anything that will rot. In the process, digesters make energy and fiber while reducing emissions. Since a digester provides several different tools for several different issues, an installation is very likely to be running many years in the future--even a future very different from today.

Last week, Washington's State Energy Program awarded a second round of energy grants and loans through the Commerce Department; a Farm Power affiliate called Rainier Biogas received a $1.4 million grant/loan combo. Rainier Biogas was set up to build a digester in the shadow of Mount Rainier near Enumclaw, a small town about an hour southeast of Seattle. Enumclaw hosts one of the surviving half-dozen clusters of dairy farms in the Puget Sound region; although it is too far from the interstate for intensive building, the century-old farming community is threatened by the typical slide towards a post-agricultural pseudo-economy. Rainier Biogas will help the remaining dairy farmers on the Enumclaw Plateau better manage their manure while becoming self-sufficient in cow bedding from the digester's fiber product. Keeping the farms in the area will retain $30 million in annual local production, a boon for a community that can otherwise look only to tourism and boom-blight exurban building trends.

Not everyone approves of the government picking energy as a stimulus winner; the day of the announcement, the right-leaning Washington Policy Center singled out Rainier Biogas as a particularly wasteful way to create jobs. While both state and federal governments have a spotty record on supporting biofuels projects that actually succeed, manure digesters have consistently provided effective economic impact. It comes down to value judgments that someone must make: energy infrastructure is simply better for the economy than another housing development, and supporting existing agriculture is just more efficient policy than building industry (or worse, service business) where none existed before.

Rainier Biogas: expanding local energy, nutrient, and fiber output on the beautiful Enumclaw Plateau from 2011 for decades into the future.

Soil

2010-03-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

I read The Oil Drum blog somewhat regularly; as one might expect, the site focuses on energy in general and petroleum in particular, but I checked out a posting about soil the other day. One of the comments struck a chord:

"The absolute worst case scenario, from a nutrient standpoint, is what we are doing today.

Producing any grain (corn, soybeans, wheat, etc) and shipping that food away from where it was grown is the largest depleter of P & K [phosphorus and potassium] from the land. By exporting food out of where it was grown your are exporting your most concentrated nutrients the plants have stored. The process essentially is mining the soil.
You want to be exporting only C,H,O,and N off the land. They are all replaced via gases in the atmosphere. A century ago most of the food was recycled where it was grown via animal or human consumption and waste. Not so today. Exporting food from the "interior" to the major cities on the coasts moves P & K away from productive land, essentially into water systems"

The main nutrients plants need are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium--NPK. Most nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas, while legumes such as peas, alfalfa, and soybeans can also fix nitrogen naturally. Unfortunately, we don't have the same plant-based alternate sources of phosphorus and potassium--everything we use is either mined from phosphate and potash deposits or recycled organic matter.

Anaerobic digesters offer an opportunity to improve the recycling of nutrients--not only does manure become easier to handle, but food waste can be mixed in and its nutrients returned easily to farmland. It's definitely an improvement over practices other food-waste treatment practices such as composting and water treatment facilities. As long as most compost ends up as landscaping material, the nutrients might as well be gone, and wastewater treatment typically treats nutrients as a problem to be minimized rather than a resource to be recovered.

A movie called "Dirt" has recently gotten quite a bit of attention; I haven't seen it yet, and I suspect it doesn't dwell on specific nutrient issues, but hopefully it has been raising awareness over the importance of caring for the soil. A future with well-balanced agriculture needs plenty of awareness--and good stocks of phosphorus and potassium.

A trillion dollar energy overhaul

2010-03-06T16:14:00.000-08:00

During the past few months, the federal government has given about two billion dollars to completed renewable energy projects and provided construction grants (through the Department of Energy or state energy programs) for several billion dollars more. These are impressive totals, and there is more to come. Unfortunately, the stimulus package is only making a tiny down payment on the enormous cost of overhauling our energy system.

Americans use energy in two primary forms: liquid fuels and electricity. Expensive conversion equipment allows raw energy sources such as petroleum and coal to be refined into these two forms of energy. For a variety of reasons, some of the conversion equipment we have installed over the past half-century is becoming obsolete and will have to be replaced soon--but at a staggering cost. I estimate the energy overhaul during the next two decades will cost about a trillion dollars.

Let's look at electricity first. The United States uses about 4,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually (while we're talking about trillions, when converted into electric-bill kilowatt-hours that number becomes four trillion kWh); coal-fired power plants have typically produced about half of that amount. The good news is that electricity usage dropped slightly each of the past two years, and the portion generated by coal dropped as well. The bad news is that we're going to have to start cutting back on coal-fired generation for three main reasons:

older plants not only waste about 70% of the energy in the coal but they also lack pollution control and are simply wearing out
while the United States has vast amounts of low-grade coal, we're running out of the best stuff (and the Appalachian mountains that are blasted away to get at it)
burning coal does more to drive climate change than any other human activity

I expect that half our coal plants will still be running twenty years from now, but we still have to replace a huge amount of equipment. Let's assume that electricity demand remains stable (not at all assured, with recession pulling one direction and electrification--primarily of transportation and heating--pulling the other); we still have to build enough power plants to supply a trillion kWh a year. Since a year consists of 8760 hours, it would take new power plants rated at more than 120 million kW to produce this much electricity. Natural gas plants are the cheapest capacity currently on the market, but building plants capable of running most of the year on renewable fuel (like wood biomass or wind) costs around $5,000 per average kilowatt. Altogether, this partial overhaul of our electricity generation system will cost over $600 billion.

Now let's look at liquid fuels. The United States uses about 200 billion gallons of gasoline and diesel each year. All of this is refined from petroleum, and we import the majority of the petroleum. As with electricity, consumption of liquid fuels has dropped slightly during the past two years, but the bad news is similar: we are going to have to cut back on petroleum refining for three reasons:

older refineries were designed to run on the high-quality, low-sulfur ("light sweet") crude oil that flowed from early wells; refitting them to run on the heavier oils more commonly pumped today will be so costly that some refineries will just be shut down
the United States imports over half its oil, sometimes from places we'd rather not see benefit from our dollars
transportation emissions are the second largest source of greenhouse gases (after generation of electricity).

Industry measures its production in forty-two gallon barrels per day; again, this production currently takes place at 150 refineries, billion-dollar installations with an average capacity of over 100,000 barrels per day. Liquid fuels can be produced from other carbon/hydrogen sources, ranging from natural gas to wood waste, using processes that can differ substantially from oil refining and require very specialized equipment.

Let's assume that fuel demand drops, but we still have replace almost half of the lower demand--six million barrels per day of transportation fuels and other petroleum-replacement products. The EIA graph above shows that equipment for refining crude oil is the cheaper than any alternatives--just one of the reasons why there is twenty times more oil refinery capacity than corn ethanol capacity, the next largest liquid fuel source.

The cost of equipment varies inversely with the cost of its feedstock; natural gas is quite expensive, while some biomass can be free or even better. I expect we'll even have some coal-to-liquids conversion, using the extra feedstock freed up by closing the less efficient half of the coal-fired electrical generators. The coal-to-liquids plant cost of $60,000 per barrel offers a good average between the other technologies; at this price, the partial overhaul of our liquid fuel system production system costs almost $400 billion.

So, a cool trillion dollars buys the United States an energy capacity similar to today's but cuts coal and oil consumption by half. It's not complete energy independence and many facilities still require purchased feedstocks. The most interesting question, though, is whether we can afford this trillion-dollar overhaul; the United States has burned through close to that amount of stimulus funding without having a serious impact on energy infrastructure. Is there much hope that we'll focus our efforts better in the future?

Rural green power--a conference worth attending

2010-02-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

We at Farm Power don't attend many conferences; we don't even consider the substantial number of gatherings that charge four-digit fees to attend, and we steer clear of conferences that are thinly-disguised attempts to capitalize on green/clean as the hot topic of the moment. Fortunately, a few still pass our muster and allow for some great networking. The EPA's AgSTAR program puts on great manure-digester-focused events around the country; I attended their 2007 conference. Closer to home, Climate Solutions--an advocacy group fighting global warming--sponsors a regional convention on rural green power: Harvesting Clean Energy 2010 starts next weekend in Kennewick and looks to be worth the drive. The smaller-scale renewable-energy industry in Washington state is pretty small, so it will be good to see what's happening in more-active Oregon while catching up with friends from our corner of the green power business. I'm even contributing to two panel discussions, one on digesters and another entitled "Politics and Your Project". Registration remains open, so if you can spare a couple days to see what's happening at the intersection of agriculture and energy, I recommend Harvesting Clean Energy.

Render Unto Caesar

2010-01-29T07:56:00.000-08:00

I send a check to the Washington State Department of Revenue yesterday; it covered the Business and Occupation (B&O) Tax we've been incurring since starting to produce electricity in August. Unlike the income tax charged by the federal government and many other states, the B&O tax is based on revenue rather than profit. The rate varies depending on the type of revenue (the chart above shows the rate for manufacturing; the rate for service businesses is much higher at 1.5%, while some types of food processors pay a rate as low as 0.138%). However, many in the business community hate this tax because it keeps on accruing right through a recession, even when losses are piling up.

A great history of Washington State taxes found here shows that we never intended to have this needs-blind tax--it was an emergency measure to raise money during the Great Depression after the state supreme court struck down a voter-approved income tax. Three-quarters of a century later, Washington remains one of a half-dozen states without an income tax (four more votes failed, most recently in 1975). The resulting reliance on property and especially sales taxes earns our state a special distinction: the most unequal tax structure in the nation.

Voters in Oregon just approved a hike in their income tax rates, but preemptive opposition immediately appeared against taking such measures here to fill the $2.6 billion state budget shortfall. So the Legislature will spend the next month struggling through more cuts, and I'll get ready to send another small check in three months--if nothing else, we at Farm Power are doing our part.

More Rexville Pictures Online

2010-01-14T09:43:00.000-08:00

Our builder recently updated their webpage. The first part of the digester section features several photos from our project, but the Farm Power Rexville page has two dozen shots from various stages of construction and completion. One of my favorite shots is the delivery of our genset--it came halfway across the country on a truck and then moved the final one hundred feet to its resting place by crane (this was back in May 2009). Check out the rest of the Andgar website too--we hope to have another project listed there soon!

Seattle Renewable Energy Meetup

2009-12-22T08:14:00.000-08:00

For those of you already planning for after the holidays, I'll be speaking in Seattle on Thursday evening, January 21st, at the Renewable Energy Meetup. By then Farm Power Rexville will have almost five months of operations behind it and perhaps I'll even have some more progress to report on Farm Power Lynden. I've been giving a development-themed presentation for so long that I need to redesign it to reflect the fact we're actually producing power now! I'm looking forward to other conferences and presentations in 2010, so watch this space for more information.

One gigawatt-hour

2009-12-06T18:51:00.000-08:00

We recently produced our one millionth kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity. That sounds impressive compared to how much an individual home consumes (10-12,000 kWh a year), but the utility industry refers to production in terms of MWh (a thousand kWh) or GWh (a million kWh) which makes the milestone seem less imposing. Our generator is making a little bigger impact on the needs of the Puget Sound Energy Green Power program, producing a bit over one percent of all the renewable energy purchased by voluntary customers.

The New York Times published an article critical of green power programs, but one of their strengths is the ability to bring electricity usage into more human-scale terms. PSE's Green Power comes from about a dozen distinct and relatively small projects in the Northwest, while the larger utility system draws power from hundreds of often-enormous plants spread across the western U.S. and Canada. Unlike other states, Washington requires all renewable energy premiums to stay in their respective programs rather than padding utility profits. We've been very happy working with the PSE program, and we hope their customers who are familiar with us feel more connected to their electricity usage--our generator is running day and night, turning out kilowatt-hours for you!

Are cows worse than coal?

2009-11-02T17:32:00.001-08:00

Just when the "clean coal" public-relations campaign seemed to be losing momentum, the Worldwatch Institute came out with a report blaming livestock for over half of all greenhouse-gas emissions. I can't imagine a better gift to the coal industry; the consensus has always been that burning coal is the single largest cause of warming, but now more confusion threatens to push the debate backwards.

The report makes a number of questionable claims, but one stands out: Worldwatch contends that since livestock have been domesticated, even their breathing should be counted as a human-caused emission. This ignores the reality that huge numbers of wild animals, especially methane-producing ruminants, used to roam the earth without ever registering the 25-gigaton CO2 impact ascribed to modern livestock. For example, the American buffalo population two hundred years ago likely exceeded the current population of all American dairy and beef cows combined. A report with so little concern for consistency resembles propaganda more than research.

The second half of the article reads like an extended advertisement for veggie burgers, with the implication that replacing meat with "soy analogs" could eliminate those inflated greenhouse-gas emissions. Meat has become a pretty easy target for a variety of activists and I won't try to defend it, but I do reject the claim that all animal proteins cause terrible environmental impacts relative to a vegan diet. Here are some reasons why dairy is at least as sustainable as soy:

Production of soy protein does not use materially less land than production of dairy-farm protein; this holds true for both industrial and organic production. I encourage any reader to run the numbers--for industrial methods, both end up at about 750 pounds of usable protein per acre.
Up to half of dairy cow diets typically consist of forage crops--alfalfa and grass that require minimal spraying, cultivation, and processing; in contrast, row crops like soybeans must be tilled and planted annually.
American farmers produce twice as much milk with half as many cows as they kept in the 1920s. This smaller dairy population has less absolute and per-capita impact in every area.
Manure in less-mechanized dairy farming is typically handled as a solid that produces little methane; farms that handle their manure as a liquid also have the ability to extract energy from that manure with an anaerobic digester--which not only destroys the methane but also can replace fossil sources of energy.
Dairy farming provides its own fertilizer; while soybeans fix their own nitrogen, they still need regular doses of phosphorus and potassium (along with micronutrients) to stay in production.

Taking this report at face value should lead to calls to kill off our livestock while continuing to burn coal; hopefully, cooler heads will prevail and remind us that thousands of years of agriculture have fed us without cooking us.

Ribbon-cutting

2009-10-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

On a beautiful Monday morning, September 28th, we held our ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Farm Power Rexville digester. Guests started showing up half an hour early, and soon we had three rows of cars alongside the project driveway and more folks parked on the road! But it was too nice of a day to worry about parking problems and people gradually drifted across the broad gravel area west of the digester towards the Rexville Grocery catering (including local apples and scones made with blueberries grown within site of the project). Some guests mentioned already having heard our story on KUOW radio while driving up.

The festivities began when Governor Chris Gregoire arrived. First we thanked our investors and other financial partners: Shorebank Pacific took top billing as our lender, and we were honored to have Puget Sound Energy CEO Steve Reynolds (with me and one of our investors at right) come to speak about his company's focus on sustainable energy resources and its Green Power program. Not only is PSE buying our power on a bank-friendly ten-year contract, but it has also helped get the word out about our project with press releases and the community-focused blogging of public-relations guru Andy Wappler; they even allowed us to use some of the photos they took at the ribbon-cutting (except for the first one, all the pictures on this blog post are courtesy of PSE).

Next we thanked our manure-related partners: Andgar Corporation completed our digester on time and on budget, lending their expertise accumulated on five previous projects to make sure everything worked right. The two dairy farms just north and south of the project, run by the VanderKooy and Kuipers families, received special appreciation for their absolutely indispensable role. Then everyone from the program up to that point lined up to cut a ribbon in front of the mechanical building overhead door.

Cutting the ribbon are Kevin Maas (Farm Power), Steve Reynolds (PSE), Garritt Kuipers (Beaver Marsh Farms), Daryl Maas (Farm Power), Jae Easterbrooks (Shorebank), Bryan Van Loo (Andgar), Jason VanderKooy (Harmony Dairy), Gerrit Kuipers (Beaver Marsh Farms), and Eric Vander Kooy (Harmony Dairy).

With the project now "open", we invited the governor up to speak to the crowd. She told us that she is a big fan of anaerobic digesters and has now visited three of them. She also continued the day's dairy theme by emphasizing the contribution of embattled farmers to the state. The Capital Press posted a video with part of her speech (and some words from dairyman Eric VanderKooy as well!). We were honored that Governor Gregoire made time to visit our event, and our community could see clear evidence that her priorities include clean energy and agriculture.

A final few words came from that great friend of Skagit County agriculture, state Senator Mary Margaret Haugen. Then we brought up Steve Reynolds and Governor Gregoire again to help us start the generator; we were standing on the stage outside the building, but with a push of the mouse button on my old iBook our 750kW Guascor roared to life and the program concluded.

Many guests stayed around for the better part of an hour, looking over the site and catching up. The Skagit County agricultural community was out in force, and other elected officials made time to visit: Representatives Barbara Bailey and Norma Smith from our 10th Legislative District, Skagit County Commissioners Sharon Dillon and Ron Wesen, 40th District Representative Dave Quall, House Energy Committee Chair John McCoy of the 38th District, and Mayor Ramon Hayes of La Conner. We thank everyone who came to celebrate with us!

Farm Power Lynden

2009-10-05T20:23:00.001-07:00

Our Congressman--Rick Larsen of Washington's 2nd District--put out a press release about our USDA grant, but otherwise the publicity has been limited. We'll see whether that continues after today's announcement of stimulus-funded state energy grants and loans; Farm Power Lynden was one of several anaerobic digester projects funded. The state energy program emphasized job creation, so our partnership with Van Wingerden Inc.'s new greenhouse project helped us compete--we are thrilled to be among those chosen to pump sustainable investment into Washington's economy.

Calling the bottom

2009-10-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

After the worst six months in the history of the American dairy business, we may be able to call the bottom on milk prices. Farmers are paid per hundred pounds (cwt) of milk--about eleven and a half gallons. Prices this year are lower than they've been in decades. The top two lines on the chart above show prices during 2007 and 2008, which were pretty good. Farmers generally broke even during 2005 (the middle line around $14/cwt), but 2006 was horrible and this year has been even worse. Even now, a typical dairy farmer loses several dollars per hundredweight--at least $0.15/gallon--while store prices only gradually inch downwards.

The current price situation results from farmers setting milk-production records just when recession-hit consumers started spending less in the dairy section. Since the United States has no system for balancing out these sorts of shifts in supply and demand, the dairy industry has been spending its own money to "retire" milking herds--paying farmers to beef their cows. This helped a bit, but the only real hope is economic recovery and higher demand for dairy products.

European farmers have not been as subtle about their economic pain. French agriculture protests are not new, but the picture above shows ethnic-Dutch Belgian farmers spraying almost a million gallons of milk on their fields rather than deliver it at a steep loss. Even European Union subsidies have not been able to cushion the crisis in the dairy industry. People are thinking hard about more sustainable models for milk; we can only hope that they are now adopted and work.

First returns on 2009 grant season

2009-09-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

The USDA announced the bulk of its Renewable Energy for America Program (REAP) awards on Thursday. If you page all the way to the bottom of the announcement, past hundreds of Midwestern projects, you can find Farm Power Lynden's award: a $500,000 grant plus a $2.4 million loan guarantee! Once again, Shorebank Pacific stepped up for the loan portion, strengthening their bid to be the premier green power lender in the state. This year continued the trend towards smaller grants, so we only had a little competition from a couple wind turbine projects for the largest loan/grant combo of 2009. FP Lynden needs more development before it's ready to go, but this is a great start.

Along with a smaller round announced several weeks earlier, the total national REAP funding exceeds $75 million. A small amount of this has been directed to feasibility studies, but otherwise this program is one of only a few available to small businesses that actually funds construction (rather than research). One blogger suggested that REAP be renamed "Renewable Energy for Iowa Program", but it's good to see other states outside the Midwest getting into the action; our state USDA office would love to help more people put together competitive applications--give them a call!

Manure in the news

2009-09-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

The media advisory for our ribbon-cutting ceremony on September 28th went out yesterday and triggered another round of interest in manure-to-energy. An article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (a newspaper that recently abandoned paper for online) has been picked up by a number of other news sources. The author's focus on manure led to a gallons-per-kWh statistic that is a bit skewed by the wash water that mixes with the poo on the farms and the food-processing waste that we mix in at the digester. But the fact remains that manure--pouring from the pipe above at hundreds of gallons per minute--is reliably turning into electricity at our anaerobic digester. As long as we keep the facility maintained and the cows keep eating, the electricity will continue to flow.

Liquid fuels grant us another road trip

2009-09-13T17:41:00.000-07:00

I spent Labor Day driving back from Colorado, where I had attended my cousin's wedding. Due to a meandering route on the way down, the total trip stretched to about four thousand miles. My Prius sipped fuel at an average rate of 48mpg despite climbing one mountain pass after another, so gasoline for the entire trip cost less than $250.

We are still living at the peak of civilization when two days average American wages can fuel leisure travel halfway across the country. We burned one gallon of gasoline just to go out of our way to visit PSE's Wild Horse Wind and Solar Center; there I found special parking for my Prius!

Slow Money

2009-09-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

The Slow Money Alliance just wrapped up its first national gathering last week; combining ideas from the sustainable investing and slow food movements, Slow Money has also been getting some press. We move in some of the same circles as Slow Money people, and we fully agree on the need to re-align capital and sustenance. From Farm Power's perspective, the key is to get that capital moving into tangible projects.

During the successive investment booms of the past decade, money poured into increasingly "weightless" concepts; one common feature of websites, commodities derivatives, and collateralized debt obligations is that they were a collection of money and ideas rather than physical capital. People made enormous fortunes without ever producing a widget, building a facility, or buying any land. We've since discovered that this form of wealth creation is unsustainable; unfortunately, the sustainable investment movement continues to work with the same tools and concepts.

We've poured over three million dollars into our first anaerobic digester project. Now it's finally starting to pay off: each day thousands of gallons of waste turn into a truckload of digested fiber and enough electricity to run a house for more than a year. This physical capital requires steady attention; yesterday I wrestled with a hose full of manure, and that won't be the last time. Financial returns will accumulate over the next few decades--the definition of slow money. But we're producing green power, reducing greenhouse gases, paying farmers, and processing waste in a very tangible way. We are able to do this because local investors--and Shorebank--were willing to commit their money for the long haul.

Tomorrow I'm leaving for the Agriculture 2.0 conference, where I will give a short presentation on Farm Power. I'm hopeful that I'll meet plenty of people who want to create new tools and concepts for capital investing that can sustain us. My advice to the slow money movement: join companies and investors who are already building sustainable agriculture--start investing and learn while funding real projects.

A Lecture at the Burlington Library

2009-09-09T00:09:00.001-07:00

I've been invited to speak as part of the Skagit "Living Green" Lecture Series; it's at the Burlington library on Thursday night at 7pm, and all are welcome. Now that we are up and running, I get to make some changes to our standard presentation--shifting from future to present tense!

Biogas to Electricity

2009-09-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

I continue to post pictures even though digesters aren't that photogenic--all that's going on in the shot above is some numbers appearing on the displays to let us know we've just exported our first electricity to the grid. A huge milestone for Farm Power, but just not that great a visual. This took place on Friday evening; by mid-morning Saturday, the genset had been pushed up to its maximum 750kW output. Since then, output has fluctuated along with our biogas supply, but managing that for improvement is a lot more fun with the meter spinning.

Biogas

2009-08-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

If you look closely, you can see a faint yellow flame above our flare--that's biogas being burned off! We started adding fresh manure to the digester a week ago, and the bacteria have responded. Since our generator won't be cleared to deliver electricity until next week, we have to flare the biogas. This is already progress, though, since we're using manure that would otherwise be emitting methane in a lagoon; combusting that methane leaves much-less-potent carbon dioxide. Almost two and a half years after we first decided to test the carbon-offset business, we're finally starting to do our part.

Local cheese

2009-08-08T10:52:00.000-07:00

I love cheddar cheese. I eat it on sandwiches, crackers, and tacos. In recent years, Americans have been finding ways to consume more and more cheese; some analysts attribute much of this trend to gourmet pizza.

One might begin to be concerned for the health of America's arteries. However, American cheese consumption runs well behind many European countries, often countries with better average health. The data in the chart above is from 2003, but it shows the typical American--eating 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of cheese annually--coming in well behind the typical German, Greek, or Italian. Love of cheese clearly crosses palate boundaries. Other data shows that Europeans also drink more milk and enjoy more butter than Americans too, yet suffer from less heart disease.

European food culture seems to have evolved over the centuries into cheese consumption patterns more sustainable than ours. As a result, some celebrate the rise of American artisan cheese makers. Skagit County is home to two small dairy creameries--Samish Bay and Golden Glen, located within a few miles of each other. But most cheese in the region comes from creameries run by Tillamook Cheese and Darigold, and this cheese is practically being given away. Wholesale prices remain stuck at just over one dollar a pound; dairy farmers would be happy to see a stronger cheese culture emerge a little more quickly in the United States.

Ethanol

2009-08-04T22:44:00.001-07:00

The past two years have been tough for the ethanol industry. The blue portion of the graph above (from Iowa State University) shows typical operating profits for ethanol production; when these profits drop below the black line, a typical ethanol plant starts to have trouble paying back its investors and creditors. The purple part of the graph represents the cost of corn; in 2008, rising corn prices squeezed ethanol producers, but it took the ensuing price collapse to drive leader Verasun and others into bankruptcy. No plants were built in Washington state, but two Oregon producers filed Chapter 11.

Ethanol has been good for corn farmers but bad for just about everyone else. Ethanol-driven high corn prices filtered through to drive up the cost of other agricultural products last year, raising input costs for dairy farmers and clobbering them just as milk demand started to fall. Ethanol production consumed huge amounts of energy (mainly natural gas) in an age-old process where a third of the corn's weight just ends up as carbon dioxide byproduct. Taxpayers provided five billion dollars in subsidies to drive the cost of ethanol low enough to compete with gasoline, but those same taxpayers weren't excited to find this new fuel didn't contain as much energy per gallon.

But until other alternatives actually emerge, corn ethanol is what we have; privately-held and community-owned companies are innovating to avoid the fate of their publicly-traded peers. Surviving leader POET has started up an anaerobic digester at a South Dakota plant to eventually replace natural gas usage, while other plants burn different forms of biomass for process heat. POET is also emerging as the most credible producer of cellulosic ethanol (not made from food products), quietly passing dozens of more-hyped companies working in that space. The industry is still a bit dazed, but all is not lost.

Time to read the directions

2009-07-31T14:18:00.000-07:00

As I write this, Andgar is setting the last major pieces of equipment at the Rexville digester; the stainless-steel rectangle in the middle of the photo is a "separator" which--as its name suggests will separate fiber out of the processed digester effluent. We have a full tank of manure; we'll start taking fresh manure next week, when the tank will be warmed closer to its final 100-degree operating temperature. We have also given notice--under brand-new state regulations--that we intend to start mixing food-processing waste with the manure to further delight our resident bacteria; if you have some pre-consumer food waste that is currently being composted or landfilled, contact us! (farmpowernw[at]gmail.com)

Just in case you thought we were sitting around waiting for the manure to warm up, here are two stories out of Whatcom County--home to more dairy cows than all other counties in Western Washington combined. Articles in both the Bellingham Herald and the Bellingham Business Journal highlighted the value of green energy in driving economic development during this stubbornly-persistent recession. By tapping the power of manure, we hope to play a role in local economies throughout Western Washington.

The digester finally gets dirty

2009-07-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

On the hottest day so far this year, we're taking 1.1 million gallons of stored manure out of the neighboring lagoon and filling our digester; we are finally starting to cut methane emissions (at 93 degrees Fahrenheit, those bacteria are definitely active). Fresher manure will be added during the next month, with electricity production beginning during that time. The picture is of one of the newly-installed power poles running along the road for almost two miles north of the project; the old pole still stands, just with its top sawed off. It's been almost two and a half years, but we're almost there.

Cool Maps--No. 2

2009-07-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

NPR put out a spectacularly information-dense electricity map several months ago. You can get to the image above by choosing the "Power Plants" tab and then selecting coal; the circles represent the amount of electricity produced by each plant. Due to varying technology, the amount of coal burned or the level of emissions per unit of electricity can vary widely for power plants. The "Power Plants" map is less accurate for some other sources; sometimes the web of ownership for wind farms or cogeneration facilities gets pretty tangled, but for coal and nuclear this is an amazing resource.

Cool Maps--No. 1

2009-07-22T18:10:00.000-07:00

Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute built this historical oil imports map that follows the sources of our petroleum through the events of the last thirty-five years. The image above is from early 1983, when a combination of high prices, recession, and new Alaskan production had driven oil imports back below where they had been a decade earlier (less than three million barrels per day). Better yet, most of non-domestic oil came from Mexico at that point. The picture today looks bleaker; check it out, and remember that current U.S. production is about five million barrels per day.

Don't bet against the wind

2009-07-21T21:46:00.001-07:00

During the energy price spike in the summer of 2008, wind power looked poised to change the world; capacity expansion set records and and billionaire T. Boone Pickens proposed wind as the key to independence from imported oil. Less than a year later, wind installations are falling off and the "Pickens Plan" has stalled.

But I wouldn't start betting against the wind industry yet. Steady technological progress means that turbines can produce more efficiently at more locations than ever. The map below shows how average wind speeds in otherwise-unimpressive Indiana increase for higher turbine mountings--50 meter hub heights were typical in the 1990s, 70 meters after the year 2000, but 100 meters will be common next year. At that height, the entire northern half of the state becomes economical.

And more advanced turbines ensure the economics; recently-introduced designs for lower-speed onshore wind regimes include the Vestas V100 (1.8MW), Acciona AW-116/3000 (3MW), and the Siemens SWT-2.3-101 (2.3MW). These turbines are scaled-up versions of proven generators with blade diameters of one hundred meters or more. The wind industry is likely to see similar conditions to natural gas--an essentially limitless resource constrained primarily by economics. Like horizontal drilling in shale gas formations, the new "superturbines" will be able to generate power across vast swathes of the country, but they will only be built when electricity prices rise above a certain floor.

Federal incentives and emerging carbon restrictions will likely push the wind industry back to record levels in the next year or two. We will probably be surprised how easily wind meets one ambitious 20%-by-2030 goal.

Biogas to Wheels

2009-07-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

A half-hour north of us in Bellingham, students at Western Washington University's Vehicle Research Institute are working on one potential transportation future. Several years ago, they built Viking 32, a hybrid-electric sports car fueled by compressed biogas from the nearby VanderHaak anaerobic digester.

Next, the team plans to scale up the biogas-filtering system to provide fuel for buses. In rough terms, the annual biogas yield from one cow's manure is equal to 150 gallons of diesel, so there's definitely a transportation opportunity. The WWU students will primarily be working through other issues, such as cleaning and pressurizing the gas economically. Overall, society will have to decide when to embrace compressed natural gas as a vehicle fuel.

Coal, it keeps on rollin'

2009-07-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

Washington state gets most of its electricity from hydroelectric dams and hosts only one medium-sized coal plant. But recently I began to notice trainloads of coal rolling north through my hometown of Mount Vernon, a unwelcome reminder of how the rest of the world gets its power. These occasional trains bring coal from the American interior (probably Wyoming) to Vancouver, BC, where--along with plenty of coal from Alberta--it is shipped to Asian markets.

The picture above shows trains loading in the legendary Powder River Basin, where Montana and Wyoming host the world's largest coal mines. One trainload of coal can move up to 15,000 tons; if this is lower-energy Powder River Basin coal, it will add roughly 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere when burned (and, arguably just as disturbing, about two pounds of mercury). Each day, some seventy trains leave the Powder River mines.

The sheer scale of this movement is fascinating; I enjoyed a series of stories on coal trains by John McPhee that first appeared in the New Yorker and then became part of a book. But it's also daunting to those in the renewable-energy and greenhouse-gas-reduction worlds; for example, our first digester will have to run for almost three years to offset the emissions from just one coal train.

While we as a nation don't seem to have the political will to pull coal back from supplying half of our electricity, energy markets are giving us a bit of hope. The Energy Information Administration provides weekly updates on coal markets, and coal production has dropped somewhat this spring--likely due to pressure from sustained low natural gas prices. We have a nearly-incomprehensible amount of work to do before replacing coal, but--as I said in an earlier post--shifting to natural gas won't hurt.

Washington state tries to join solar party?

2009-07-17T14:29:00.000-07:00

Previously-unknown Teanaway Solar Reserve appeared with a splash last week, announcing plans to build a 75MW photovoltaic project in central Washington. So far, they have a location and a lot of frothy press; what's not as clear is whether their business model extends much further.

The map above shows that the country's best solar potential lies in the Southwest; not only do these areas get lots of sun, but their highest electrical demand--air-conditioning--occurs when solar energy is also near its peak. In comparison, other parts of the country get less sun and need the most power during the dark days of winter. So it's not surprising that California has three times more solar power capacity than the rest of the country combined.

This doesn't mean that photovoltaic (PV) panels don't work in large swathes of the country; they do, but they are a money-losing proposition. An article on the economics of solar power lays out the range of yield on investment for a project in an area--like Central Washington--that gets about 25% less sun than the Southwest: about 1,500kWh per year per kW of panels installed.

The 1,500kWh/kWp in the chart below means that the PV panels produce 17.1% of the power they could if the sun shown day and night, year round (this is a fair comparison, since most other energy technologies don't depend directly on the sun and produce at 80-90% of their annual potential, including renewables such as biomass and geothermal). Federal incentives extended during the past year cut the cost to build by about half, so it's not unreasonable to assume a project like Teanaway Solar could complete a project at a net price of only $3.00/watt peak. The problem is that a large solar project in the Northwest will likely have to sell its power for many years no more than $0.10/kWh. At that rate, the chart shows a yield on money invested of only 5%--and out of this must come taxes, insurance, and maintenance before any of it can be used to repay lenders or investors.

Since investors and bankers typically don't commit large sums of money for near-zero yields, the Teanaway Solar promoters must believe that renewable energy markets will shift massively in the future--perhaps a tripling of electricity prices, even more lucrative government incentives, or an unprecendented fall in the price of PV technology. That isn't a very good business plan. It fell to the pro-business-as-usual Washington Policy Center to point out the obvious problems with the plan, including that the project would cost several times more than even nearby wind installations and that other high-hype/shaky-economics energy showpieces haven't turned out well.

I know quite a few good people who have been working hard on solar for many years; I'm just hoping a near-inevitable reversal for Teanaway Solar doesn't reflect badly on the wider regional industry. And I surely hope this doesn't give the remaining detractors of renewable energy more ammunition--the next couple years aren't going to be any easier for green power, so this is my marker to help protect the brand. Let's under-promise and over-deliver; we don't have to be like California--we can have our own party.

The Climate Trust website

2009-07-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

The Climate Trust, a pioneering non-profit based in Portland, is buying our carbon offsets. Their initial interest helped launch Farm Power back in 2007, and we finally negotiated a deal with them in December. Now the Climate Trust has a beautiful new website with a page that features our first project! The page includes a link to the registry that has our project documents, a big step forward in transparency for those who really want to know where their offsets come from. Of course, we believe the best transparency is to have accessible projects that can be visited by interested stakeholders; we're having yet another tour next Saturday if you're interested.

Shorebank finally goes public with Farm Power

2009-07-03T19:06:00.000-07:00

We've been working with Shorebank Pacific for almost two years, and their money started entering our first digester project earlier this spring. Last week, the bank finally issued a press release. We got a brief mention in the Sustainable Industries Journal version, which focused more on the other Skagit County company who closed a deal with Shorebank. Renewable energy finance hasn't gotten any easier recently, so we're thrilled to be working with this green banking pioneer.

The Heart of a Digester

2009-06-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

We hosted another great tour today at our site; as usual, the highlight was our 750kW engine-generator set. The bright orange Guascor (pronounced "wah-score" here and probably different yet again in its home Basque region) has given us quite a few attractive pictures (most recently, with Daryl in a small local newspaper); in person, the massive machine is even more impressive. A genset gives a digester its economic reason for existence--our ten-year contract to sell electricity to Puget Sound Energy secures the entire project. In addition, the genset will produce all the hot water we need to keep the manure in the digester warm. Our contractor continues to install all the pipes and wires needed to be operational in August. Watch our website--we'll probably have another tour in July.

Back in the public eye

2009-06-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

This past winter, the occasional news about Farm Power involved our legislative efforts; now, with the coming of spring, our public profile has been increasing. Our local newspaper's monthly business magazine ran a story on us in their April issue (page four of the online page-turning format) that quite a few people noticed (and with a cover photo like the one above, who wouldn't?!).

A few weeks later, we received a permit from the state to offer Farm Power equity directly to middle-class investors--a pretty unique type of fundraising. We started running advertisements in newspapers like the one below and holding public meetings. The poster promotes our meeting in Bellingham on Thursday June 25th, but the full schedule is available on our websit e. We've met new people from across the Northwest, interested in the investment potential at the intersection of agriculture and energy.

Since pictures can never tell the whole story, we have also given one public tour of our rapidly-nearing-completion Rexville project; another tour is scheduled for this Saturday, June 27th. Our 750kW engine-generator set looks even more impressive in person. We expect to start filling the digester with manure in less than a month, so come by while things are still clean and new--we'll be meeting at the Rexville Grocery at 10:30am (you can grab a coffee first) and then driving over together. We hope to see you there!

The Natural Gas Century

2009-06-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Of all the fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest and the least carbon-intensive. Many projections show its usage continuing to increase in coming years even as oil production peaks and climate concerns reduce coal consumption. Unfortunately, proven natural gas reserves will only last a few decades at expected production rates. If only there was more of it around....

The chart above shows trading prices for the December 2009 futures contract. For three years, the market believed that early-winter natural gas was worth somewhere around $9.00 per thousand cubic feet (or MMbtu). Prices spiked last summer and then collapsed; although oil has recovered strongly since then, natural gas remains near its lows, with the market now saying early-winter gas is worth only about $6.00/MMbtu. Something has definitely changed.

That something is unconventional gas reserves. American natural gas production surged last year as increasing numbers of shale gas wells came online. New technology allows drilling in rock previously too impermeable to yield any gas, suddenly changing everyone's calculations around natural gas reserves. New estimates predict that the United States, rather than facing slow but steady production decline, might have enough gas to produce for the rest of the century--a quiet but hugely-important story for the petroleum industry.

This article looks at the international implications; although the author's numbers appear to be off by an order of magnitude, unlocking unconventional gas would completely change Europe's energy picture. But not yet: "while there is no active shale development project outside the US, testing is continuing on the commercial viability of some shales."

More natural gas would mean cheaper natural gas, reducing the appeal of coal; this would be good news from almost every angle. Producing electricity by burning natural gas rather than coal cuts CO2 emissions by roughly 60% and emissions of much nastier stuff (like mercury) to practically nothing. The challenge of replacing our coal-dependent electrical-generation capacity is so enormous that more plentiful gas reserves could actually ensure that natural gas fulfills its hoped-for promise as a bridge fuel to a sustainable future. Compared to many other scenarios, a 21st century fueled by natural gas is one I could handle.

Where is our green power?

2009-06-13T14:14:00.001-07:00

In my experience, people often unknowingly divide green power sources into types they've seen (solar, or sometimes wind) and more exotic types they'd like to see (tidal, for example). The Renewable Northwest Project list of green power sites
follows this pattern; it includes wind, solar, geothermal, and even some rather speculative wave/tidal projects, but it does not includes any biomass. And why should it? Biomass projects are not as common as solar, not as majestic as wind, and not as futuristic as tidal.

In short, waste-to-energy does not photograph well. The picture above is a 28MW wood-burning plant that also provides steam to a lumber mill. Similar plants can run on natural gas or coal, making distinguishing green energy difficult. However, cogeneration of electricity and steam is one of the most efficient processes we've invented, and burning waste for "combined heat and power" (or CHP, another name for cogeneration) becomes the very definition of sustainability.

Well, if simply being industrial-looking is acceptable for green energy, perhaps people don't notice cogeneration because it's relatively rare. Well, let's compare it to wind. According to the American Wind Energy Association project list, Washington currently has 1479MW of wind turbines at ten separate sites; Oregon has a few less turbines but a couple more sites. Estimated energy production is about as much as a large coal-fired power plant, but less predictable. A much less-well-known database of combined heat and power plants gives up its numbers grudgingly, but it shows that Washington is home to almost 300MW of wood-burning cogeneration plants while Oregon hosts 400MW, spread all across the two states supplying heat to about thirty lumber mills and paper plants. Although these green electricity generators produce only about half as much power each year as the Northwest's wind turbines, the CHP facilities are much more likely to be running when the electricity is most needed.

So combined heat and power is more widely distributed than wind, more reliable, AND super-sustainable; to its detriment, the technology can't claim to be new--some of these plants have been producing electricity for decades. So while solar photovoltaic gets tremendous attention along with enormous subsidies, cogeneration keeps producing a hundred times more power at competitive prices.

I hope that the lack of visibility doesn't keep people from considering the potential of waste-burning CHP for non-timber-industry applications like district heating. This has the potential to scale up rapidly and make a difference much more quickly than newer technologies; green power has been coming from Northwest forests for years, and I hope it comes to a neighborhood near you soon.

Wait 'til the farmers see me in my Prius!

2009-06-05T16:54:00.000-07:00

I just bought a 2004 Toyota Prius. It has little dings around the edges, but it still runs well and gets over 50mpg. Replacing my long-serving 1988 Honda Accord wasn't easy, but the Prius looks to be up to the task!

When the warranty expires in about six months, I'd like to try converting the Prius to a plug-in electric vehicle (PHEV). Unfortunately, battery packs like the Hymotion cost about $10,000. That price requires some serious reflection on my long-term driving plans. If I drive the PHEV Prius into the ground, perhaps putting another 170,000 miles on it over the next eleven years, I might look back from the year 2020 and say the conversion was worth it....let's do some calculations and try to find out.

First, the basics on PHEVs: they make a lot of sense for shorter trips, either allowing all-electric driving for 10-20 miles at lower speeds or doubling the already high gas mileage of a Prius for faster 30-40 mile drives. Automakers keep talking about selling new plug-in hybrids, but since cars like the Chevy Volt remain in the uncertain future, current examples almost all feature battery conversions of a Prius. These cars must be plugged in all night for a full charge, but this can be done at any outlet and having the gas engine for backup means PHEVs won't leave their drivers stranded by the side of the road when the batteries run dry.

Much of my driving consists of 10-20 mile trips; I only get on the freeway to leave the county about once a week. I'm going to assume that over half of my miles would be battery-powered, a total of 8,000 miles a year (for example, a round trip from my house to the Rexville digester site is about sixteen miles and can be done on back roads driving less than 35mph--if I'm the one who has to visit the project every day, I would put on almost 6,000 all-electric miles a year). Going battery-only on some trips (and battery-assist on many more) will save about three gallons of gasoline a week compared to just driving an unmodified Prius while adding roughly 30kWh to my power bill. At current prices, I'd save about six dollars a week in fuel costs.

I expect the price of both gasoline and electricity to be higher in 2020. Some of the inflation will likely be due to greenhouse-gas regulation, which makes exact comparison difficult. But let's just assume that after subtracting any carbon tax, gasoline costs $5.00/gallon and retail electricity costs $0.13/kWh. In 2020, I'd be saving about eleven dollars a week in fuel costs; over the course of eleven years, I would have saved a total of $5,000 dollars. That's about half the cost of the PHEV conversion.

I subtracted the fuel carbon cost above so I could fairly estimate the real greenhouse-gas savings from driving a PHEV; it looks like I'll have to consider the other half of the plug-in cost as a contribution to slowing climate change. By 2020, my gasoline reduction would be responsible for avoiding fourteen metric tons of carbon-dioxide emissions. Unfortunately, the calculations don't stop there. Since roughly half of Puget Sound Energy's electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, the new electricity I'll use for driving each year will add hundreds of pounds of CO2 emissions. My total net reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions is unlikely to exceed ten metric tons. Those are expensive tons; I'd pay about $500 per avoided ton of CO2!

PHEVs aren't going to save the world. The increased efficiency of electric driving pales in comparison to serious transporation solutions like commuter trains and better bus systems, while larger projects (like anaerobic manure digesters) can cut greenhouse-gas emissions much more quickly and economically. I hope the battery conversion kits come down in price; I may still get one if they don't. It's a subject that deserves plenty of reflection.

A Book That Made a Difference

2009-05-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

I read Small Is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher about ten years ago; much of the book was written thirty years earlier. I remember Schumacher's words resonating strongly at that point in my life; now that I've found that I'm meant to be in the manure-to-energy business, the resonance starts to make more sense.

I've run across several references to Small Is Beautiful recently, including this one several days ago on a peak oil website. The author of the piece picked out several propositions from Schumacher's economic ideas, two of which are below:

First, primary goods (those produced by or extracted from nature--vegetables, coal, lumber, etc) "must come first in any economic analysis because they supply the preconditions for production of secondary goods" (everything else, made from those goods). There are many ways to build a house, for example, but only a tree can produce wood.
Second, energy "is the gateway resource that allows all other resources to be extracted". Cheap energy allows us to many other things cheaply; the harder it is to obtain energy (think deepwater oil wells), the less resources we have for everything else. This is why we like the 20-to-1 return on energy used to run an anaerobic digester, and we like being in the energy business.

Schumacher also thought a lot about "appropriate technology"; he only saw the first rounds of globalization, so he really wouldn't be impressed by advanced factories in China producing DVD players for export while nearby peasants farm with hand tools. We won't be producing many jobs, but we are glad that manure digesters are relatively low-tech--most repair can be accomplished locally, and we aren't destroying anyone's livelihood by undercutting a more labor-intensive process. So read Small Is Beautiful if you get a chance--if it doesn't appeal to you now, you never know what you might think of it ten years down the road.

Farm Power connections

2009-05-28T09:13:00.000-07:00

Now that it's summer, we at Farm Power are finally getting to work on long-delayed projects. To keep everyone updated, we're trying to provide more outlets for news. Yielding to the 21st century, we've finally set up a Farm Power twitter account and are learning how to use it. The Farm Power Facebook group has been around for a year, but we're using it more now.

And what is the news that needs outlets? Well, construction is accelerating--the digester tank is almost complete and the roof panels will start going on in early June. We have also received a permit from the state to raise more money to help fund future projects, something we're pretty excited about; the word is starting to spread and we're holding public meetings throughout Western Washington. I can't guarantee a steady stream of updates, but enough is going on that there will be plenty to talk about--I hope you keep following our progress.

Good Friday

2009-04-11T14:25:00.000-07:00

Farm Power turned two yesterday, on Good Friday. Late the previous evening, the Washington State House of Representatives gave us an early birthday present, passing SB5797 by a vote of 97-0. We've been working on this bill for almost three months, making regular trips down to Olympia to visit our elected representatives and testify in front of committees. The "Sundial" on the picture above was a common meeting spot, located right between the two main legislative office buildings.

SB5797 allows anaerobic manure digesters to add a portion of food processing wastes (which feed more efficient bacteria methane production) without putting the regulatory "solid waste" designation on the manure supplied by dairy farmers. This solves one of our biggest challenges; co-digesting manure with food-processing waste makes digesters efficient enough to operate without subsidies, but no dairy farmers would accept this if it turned them into solid waste handlers. Passing this legislation, with the cooperation of the Departments of Ecology and Agriculture, lays out the rules for optimized energy production from digesters.

Many of our friends and neighbors were concerned after the Skagit Valley Herald broke the story on this issue, but the paper has been running regular updates on the legislative progress. We look forward to the bill making its final trip--to the governor's desk--and then becoming part of the Revised Code of Washington. We'd like to thank SB5797's prime sponsor, Senator Mary Margaret Haugen, secondary sponsors Senators Ranker, Brandland, and Hatfield, and the rest of the manure digester community for getting this legislation to the finish line.

It's Not A Joke--Just Economics

2009-04-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, at my local market, I purchased a gallon of generic 2% milk for $1.89 and a two-pound block of Tillamook cheddar for $4.99. Again, I wasn't finding falling prices at a WalMart Supercenter or buying off a pallet at Costco--just stopping at the little downtown Mount Vernon Red Apple. I haven't seen prices like this in years; farmers are getting about one dollar a gallon for their milk right now, so it had to filter through to the consumers eventually. Those farmers are also losing at least $0.25 for every gallon they produce. It takes almost two and a half gallons of milk to make a block of cheese, so the farmer-owners of the Tillamook Creamery have got to be hurting too (especially as their directors pursue growth in the desert and through acquisitions).

One year ago, consumers from the rest of the booming Pacific Rim were eagerly buying a significant portion of the Northwest's milk products. Now, international demand has collapsed while Americans cut back on their cheese and ice cream. It's a perfect storm for dairy farmers, who can only hope for economic recovery and milk supply cuts from cooperative-funded cow-reduction programs. The stimulus package doesn't contain a dairy section, so we need people to respond as the economics textbooks predict--buy some more of that cheap cheese and enjoy it!

Farm Power Visibility

2009-03-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

If this blog provides your primary perspective on the operations of Farm Power, you and other readers may easily start to think that life is pretty quiet at our little company....but you would be wrong. Between the regular pushes necessary to keep our first project moving towards completion, we've been keeping very busy both at home and in the region.

We had another reminder of all the support we've benefited from when we were nominated for Skagit County Startup Business of the Year. At a banquet put on by Northwest Business Monthly magazine, we ended up being chosen for the honor in front of hundreds of local businesspeople.

A Seattle Times article two weeks ago focused on the digester recently brought online by Qualco Energy just south of Monroe. We received a few lines at the end of the piece, including mention of our work near Enumclaw in southeastern King County--an effort we had quietly announced on our website a few days before.

So, some news makes it onto the website first or shows up on the Farm Power Facebook group before being posted here. Plenty will be happening during the coming weeks, so we'll do our best to keep the information flowing so you never doubt we're staying busy!

"Green Drinks" comes to Mount Vernon

2009-03-16T15:48:00.001-07:00

Who has complained about the limited sustainability community in Skagit County? I must admit that I have, but those complaints will soon become a thing of the past: after a great turnout at Renewable Energy night last week, it also looks like the "Green Drinks" movement has come to town to stay. Mount Vernon is the latest (and smallest) community in Washington state to start a sustainability-themed after-work gathering. This month, the Trumpeter Public House right downtown is hosting Green Drinks on Tuesday the 24th from 5-7pm. If any readers are in the area, I hope to see you there.

Renewable Energy at Skagit Human Rights Festival

2009-02-28T19:42:00.000-08:00

I will be at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon this Thursday evening (March 5th) for Renewable Energy night. The 56-minute documentary "Kilowatt Ours" will be shown at 7pm, followed by a panel including yours truly. Other panelists are wind developers and energy efficiency experts. This is about as local as we can get--gathering with others from Skagit County concerned about sustainability; if you are able, please join us.

Economic Stimulus

2009-02-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

Last week, Snohomish County PUD announced it had agreed to buy power from an Oregon wind farm. This "Hay Canyon" purchase comes several months after a similarly-sized deal for power from a project with a similarly-bland name, Wheat Field, also located in north-central Oregon.

Why would a citizen-owned Washington utility look south of the Columbia River for renewable energy? The answer is simple: subsidies. Oregon provides a tax credit of up to $10 million to renewable energy projects built in the state; although each of the wind farms mentioned above will cost around $200 million to build, the credit must make Oregon's electricity slightly cheaper than unsubsidized Washington green power.

Not everyone is thrilled about the attractiveness of Oregon's subsidies; some residents argue against providing benefits to out-of-state energy buyers. What is undeniable, however, is that building renewable energy projects in this economy makes a huge difference to workers and communities nearby. A 100-MW wind project like Hay Canyon or Wheat Field typically provides over a hundred jobs during construction, adds a dozen permanent maintenance positions, and pays a half-million dollars a year in property taxes. For the people working these jobs and the counties gaining tax revenue, location matters.

We finally started pouring concrete on Thursday. Our contractor handles materials purchasing, but confirmation calls from local suppliers show the impact Farm Power spending has. Drivers at Skagit Ready Mix care very much that this digester is being built here rather than Oregon; employees of Mount Vernon Building Supply probably feel the same way. Good policy should find a way to encourage both the purchase of green power and its production as close to home as possible.

Faith

2009-01-11T16:37:00.000-08:00

The new year begins with a sense of ominous foreboding in the dairy community. The chart above shows the milk price returning to where it was two years ago. During the summer of 2007, dairy farmers were making quite a bit of money; they continued to do well until input prices (especially grain, diesel, and alfalfa hay) caught up with them last summer. Farmers are now seeing some serious red ink, and the milk futures market looks absolutely appalling.

Farmers have come to expect bruising price cycles, but the swings during the past few years are unprecedented. It takes a uniquely durable type of person to get up each morning and work a fourteen-hour day taking care of cows while knowing they are going to lose a thousand dollars before bedtime. And yet the milk continues to show up on the store shelves.

Many of the families who still run dairy farms are deeply religious; at times, only belief in the wisdom of a higher plan can keep people in such a low-margin, capital-intensive business.

We at Farm Power share the faith of these dairy farmers, the belief that God is absolutely sovereign and carries out His plan through people whether they accept Him or not. During nearly two years of work, we have been protected in more ways than we know. What others might call successes, sometimes we can only call blessings, unachievable by us on our own.

At the groundbreaking, our pastor read Psalm 8 and prayed "Bless this anaerobic digester." We thank God for our community, our families, and bringing us this far; we pray that He will bless those who are struggling in this economy and our work to bring some relief.

A Century of Delicious Dairy Products

2008-12-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

I love the classic dairy images in this picture from our groundbreaking: in the middle are two dairy farmers dressed up for the occasion, and on the right is a farm inspector from the state department of agriculture. At left is our local Dairy Ambassador, a high school senior chosen each year to lead outreach efforts for the Washington State Dairy Women. Over the years, many Dairy Ambassadors have been drawn from the dairy-family-heavy school that we attended, so it was great to have the current representative at this key Farm Power event.

The dairy industry has had to work increasingly hard to keep milk in the diets of consumers, using everything from Dairy Ambassadors to the "Got Milk?" campaign. Once literally at the center of life for most of the population, milk is now competing with a dizzying array of other products for attention on supermarket shelves. Per-capita consumption of all dairy products has stabilized during the past fewer decades but remains lower during the first half of the 20th century--down about a quarter. The average American now drinks a bit less than 25 gallons of milk a year, about a third less than at the mid-century average. Butter consumption has fallen even more steeply; during the first few decades of the century, Americans were each enjoying almost 20 pounds of butter annually (more than half of all milk was consumed in this form). Now butter consumption has fallen by 75% (and has, unhappily for our arteries, been more than replaced by margarine and other fats).

Fortunately for dairy farmers, cheese and ice-cream consumption have moved in the opposite direction: ice cream exploded in popularity after World War II, and moderation since then has been more than offset by increased interest in other frozen dairy products. The biggest story is cheese--Americans eat almost ten times as much cheese as they did a century ago. Lest anyone attempt to blame this for American health problems, it is important to note that our cheese consumption still noticeably lags many healthy European countries. For example, the French not only enjoy more fluid milk and butter than Americans--they also eat 50% more cheese than we do!

Milk plays an important role in many food cultures, and we hope that Americans continue to appreciate the delicious variety of foods provided by our dairy farmers. Milk fits easily into a healthy lifestyle and links consumers to a sustainable local food production system. Milk drinkers should be asking where a store's dairy products come from--we'll be proud to tell them when their cheese, sour cream, and butter comes from Western Washington farms.

Construction Pictures

2008-12-11T17:39:00.000-08:00

For anyone wondering whether our groundbreaking was ceremonial or real, the answer can be found on on the Farm Power website or on a photo page set up by one of our supporters. We didn't waste any time starting construction; Western Washington will keep getting wetter until sometime next spring, so now is as good a time as any in the next six months.

The concrete forms will start being set next week, and work will continue as the weather permits. Pumps are set up to keep water from soaking the site too badly. Once the floor is poured, work on the walls can proceed without getting as muddy. Check in with us before stopping by--it is a work site with heavy equipment, so visitors need hard hats and someone to escort them, but we'd be happy to show you around.

Will we make a difference?

2008-11-15T19:29:00.001-08:00

Now that construction has started and some pressure has shifted to our contractor, I can get back to reflecting on the bigger picture. When we are up and running, our $3.5 million project will produce up to six million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. That's almost unnoticeable in the utility world--about one day's output from a typical natural-gas-fired power plant.

However, to get that much power from another renewable resource, you would need one large wind turbine (like the Vestas V80 above, one of many on PSE windfarms) or a few acres of photovoltaic panels. A 1.5MW+ wind turbine would cost about the same as our anaerobic digester, but it would have to be located somewhere in the southeast quarter of Washington to produce its full potential. A solar photovoltaic installation could be located in Western Washington, but it would have to extremely large and spectacularly expensive to produce six million kWh each year--30,000 panels costing at least $40 million to install. Moving the installation to California or some other sunny location would cut the size and cost in half, but solar is still the priciest option.

So manure power will make a difference in Western Washington because we have few options here for renewable energy. But more importantly, a digester does much more than just collect the sun's rays or spin in the wind; our project will also be providing free cow bedding to dairy farmers, cutting methane emissions, and reducing manure odor. In the future, we may find valuable uses for all of our extra hot water or discover some new service that we never even imagined the system could do. An anaerobic digester is the Swiss army knife of renewable energy, and we can't wait to get ours up and running!

Groundbreaking

2008-11-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I haven't posted anything during the last month is that we finally broke ground on our first project! About 140 people came out and celebrated with us on October 28th, one of the last sunny days of autumn. It was a great crowd--a mix of farmers, politicians, investors, government officials, neighbors, and other supporters.

We kept the speeches to less than half an hour, but we still got to hear greetings from the governor--brought by her husband Mike Gregoire--and encouraging words from Congressman Rick Larsen, state senator Mary Margaret Haugen, and Puget Sound Energy's Andy Wappler.

We also fit in three separate check presentations, including one representing our loan from Shorebank Pacific shown in the bottom picture. Afterwards, people stayed around to talk for another hour and finish off the snacks, making it a full afternoon.

The Capital Press talked to a bunch of people and ran a great story on the event. We also were mentioned on KPLU the day before and finally made it into Sustainable Industries Journal a few days later. We hope everyone who attended enjoyed the groundbreaking as much as we did; check back for all the postings I skipped during this exciting period!

Harvest

2008-10-08T19:21:00.000-07:00

I have spent much of the last two days helping a dairy farmer friend chop corn silage. Despite a cold spring, the corn turned out pretty well--forming a ten-foot-high wall in the picture above. This field is over half a mile long, so harvesting consists of the tractor chopping three rows of corn going east, then skipping over to another gap and chopping back west. Half an hour later, the tractor is back where it started and one acre of standing green corn has been turned into 20-25 tons of silage.

I was enlisted to help move all this tonnage. The farm truck above holds 6-7 tons of silage, so after about half a row was chopped I would back up next to the tractor, which would dump its wagon into the truck. Laboring in second gear, I then drove each load to the silage bunker at the farm a few hundred yards beyond the end of the field. Another truck, boasting two rear axles and substantially better loaded performance, alternated in the hauling.

So why the trucks? Well, harvest is that fascinating time where one gets a glimpse of the essence of farming. The window for chopping corn silage generally lasts less than a month; dairy farmers want the corn to have matured as much as possible but don't want it to get too dry. During this window, autumn weather starts to intrude on the harvest schedule, and then there is always the threat of the chopper breaking down. So the key is to have the tractor chopping as much as possible rather than hauling wagons of silage back and forth. Unlike most other occupations, poor timing doesn't simply mess with one's vacation schedule; in dairy farming, missing harvest time can have a substantial impact on the quality and quantity of feed available for the cows during the rest of the year.

All this work consumes quite a bit of diesel; the rule of thumb is one gallon per ton of silage, although we were working close enough to the farm that this field's consumption was lower than average. Fortunately, a ton of silage can provide half the diet of a hungry Holstein for an entire month; during that month, our silage-munching cow will produce up to 300 gallons of milk. Finally, the feed that isn't digested returns as manure to completely fertilize the field for next year!

Speaking of our favorite natural fertilizer, we were mentioned in the most recent print version of Manure Manager magazine--it was just a repeat of the Puget Sound Energy press release from this spring, but we are still happy to make it into ag-focused publications. Dairy farmers don't typically read green-future-envisioning magazines like World Changing, so we need to meet everyone where they're at.

The Market Value of Carbon Offsets

2008-09-29T17:26:00.000-07:00

On the same day as a historic stock market collapse, we get news of a successful auction of the right to emit carbon dioxide. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI, or "Reggie") announced that last week's sealed-bid auction sold all the available CO2 emissions allowances for $3.07 per ton; this was the first chance for power plants in the ten Northeast states that participate in RGGI to buy allowances. RGGI becomes mandatory in 2009, and there will be thirteen more auctions before the first real accounting in early 2012.

This auction is also historic; although Europeans have been trading CO2 in a massive mandatory market for several years, those allowances were initially given away. RGGI only covers power plants and seeks to merely cut emissions 10% below current levels by 2019, but it can now claim the world's first CO2 auction.

Voluntary CO2 markets have existed in the United States for several years. The Chicago Climate Exchange set up a trading mechanism for greenhouse-gas reductions, but it has been buffetted by the inability of the federal government to make any progress on climate change legislation. Instead, regional organizations like RGGI and the California-led Western Climate Initiative have taken the lead, causing uncertainty over standards. Each region plans to regulate different industries and emissions, measure by varying methodogies, and reach independent goals. Meanwhile, some leaders continue to call for a carbon tax instead of a market for emissions.

At Farm Power, we will be reducing methane emissions from manure storage. Methane has at least 21 times the climate-changing power of carbon dioxide, so our reductions will be significant. We spent quite a bit of time last year exploring a sale of our reductions into the RGGI market, which allows power plants to buy a small percentage of offsets from projects like ours rather than buying allowances at auction. However, the RGGI offset system had yet to fully mature; we now expect to sell into the voluntary market for quite a few years until the alternatives become clear.

For today, we congratulate RGGI for pulling off its auction. The price stayed above the minimum, and now speculators have a new currency to trade in--a toast to the free market!

Bainbridge Graduate Institute Sends out Fifth Class, Welcomes Seventh

2008-09-20T16:01:00.000-07:00

I received my MBA from Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI) in June 2007, when we were already well into the development of Farm Power. I visited regularly during the next year but didn't make it to graduation this June; fortunately, BGI just put out a newsletter with stories about the event which sent the fifth class out into the world.

This month, a seventh cohort of "change agents" is beginning its sustainable business education journey; the orientations have ended and the first round of classes takes place this week. BGI welcomes its largest class ever, and the excitement is contagious--as graduation speaker Van Jones said, the world is waiting for the students and their ideas.

And the media coverage update: the BGI newsletter included an article called "From Poop to Power", but more eyes probably saw an article on our grant in the Capital Press. This is just one more illustration of the different worlds Farm Power lives in; it is difficult to imagine two groups of readers more different than those who get the "The Circle" from BGI and those who read the west's weekly agricultural newspaper, but we love them both!

She's our state senator!

2008-09-17T11:17:00.000-07:00

Most farmers in Skagit County call themselves Republicans. A mix of business and social issues make them at home in the GOP, and their fields often host campaign signs for Dino Rossi and other Republican candidates. However, several of these same fields also host large signs for State Senator Mary Margaret Haugen (D-10th), a longtime supporter of agriculture. Skagit County farmers are not stupid; they know that having a powerful friend in the Legislature trumps party ideology.

A conservative political action committee has targeted Mary Margaret with a TV attack ad on the standard script--"Democrats spend lots of money". If these tactics succeed in propelling political newcomer Linda Haddon into the Legislature, the 10th district will suffer a huge loss. Why? I'll let the Haugen campaign explain with its "respected and effective" advertisement, found on YouTube here. In the first seconds, you can see Mary Margaret walking with the farmers who will be hosting our digester.

Our state senator was the primary sponsor of almost one hundred bills during this last legislative session; several of these aided agriculture, while others addressed issues important to a wide range of 10th district voters. As the chair of the Transportation Committee and a senior member of the Democratic party which controls (and will continue to control) the Legislature, Mary Margaret can get things done. People of both parties in Skagit County appreciate her effectiveness.

The best money the federal government spends

2008-09-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

Most grants--both private and federal--fund studies, program development, and similar activities. However, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency program that awards grants for actually installing green power systems or high-efficiency retrofits. The program originally awarded $23 million in grants annually; more recently, some of the money has been shifted to funding loan guarantees. Midwestern states have aggressively pursued this USDA funding, and it has enabled the construction of dozens of anaerobic digesters.

From the beginning, we planned to make a renewable energy grant a part of our funding package. We applied for the maximum grant--along with two loan guarantees--in June and settled in to wait for the USDA to its work. In most years the results came out in September, but things moved more quickly this year--awards were announced on August 27, and Farm Power received its full $500,000!

We were the only Washington recipient--actually, the first award to the state since 2005--so our Congressional delegation was happy to hear that their letters of support helped; Congressman Larsen's office put out a press release. Now if Congress would just pass an extension to the Renewable Energy Production Tax Credit.... The Skagit Valley Herald ran another little story and various supporters celebrated; we actually got the news during a day-long series of meetings in Whatcom County, so we were too tired to do much! I guess we'll just celebrate in a couple months when we're actually building.

Low-cost producer?

2008-08-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

I wrote in an earlier post about the rising cost of coal; that market seems to have cooled off a bit in recent weeks, but then I saw an article from the Northwest Energy Coalition on the total cost of generating electricity from coal. Rapidly-rising prices for boilers, turbines, and other industrial equipment has driven up the fixed cost of large generating plants (those typically burning coal or uranium), as seen in the above chart drawn from the article. In comparison, the increase in wind turbine prices we've seen over the past several years hasn't had nearly as large of an impact on the cost of generating electricity from wind, since fixed maintenance costs haven't risen--and variable fuel costs are nonexistent.

All of these calculations ignore the potential cost of carbon regulations. A $20-per-tonne-CO2 price would add another penny to the cost of a coal kWh; the impact on natural gas generation would only be a third of a cent, while wind and nuclear would look even more attractive. Check out this brilliant spoof advertisement on the joys of coal; ironically, coal may not even be the lowest-cost option anymore!

"Methane Power Team Cautious on PUD"--Skagit Valley Herald

2008-08-10T21:50:00.000-07:00

The Skagit Valley Herald ran a front-page story on Sunday that finally linked our project with another issue--proposed public (PUD) ownership of the county's electrical system; the first few paragraphs of overview are available online (with the more in-depth section unfortunately limited to subscribers only).

Our local public utility district has pitched its bid to take over the electrical system as a win-win initiative that will cut power bills while also defying Puget Sound Energy's plan to sell itself to Australian investors. Almost as an afterthought, PUD leaders also claimed on several occasions that they would be better supporters of green power as well.

I detailed our doubts on PUD support for green power in a March posting; more recently, we have been attending public forums where we have continued to contrast Puget Sound Energy's proven record on renewable energy with the less-enthusiastic support from government-run utilities, most notably Snohomish County PUD. Almost everyone likes the idea of local renewable energy, but we still don't seem to have convinced the pro-PUD side to grapple with the green power reality--it's not free, and developers don't start projects just based on nice words.

Local renewable energy simply does not happen without active, tangible, and bankable utility support. We have been working closely with Puget Sound Energy's green power team for almost a year and a half; they offer a regulator-approved contract that will pay about eight cents for every kilowatt-hour we will produce between now and 2018. This is the sort of support that convinced Shorebank Pacific to make a large loan commitment for our project; only at this level of support can anyone justify investing millions of dollars in a manure digester. For the sake of energy consumers, farmers, and local economies, we hope the Northwest's utilities will all follow PSE's lead and take clear action in support of green power.

Different cows, different impact

2008-08-01T16:09:00.000-07:00

I noticed an article in E--The Environmental Magazine last month called "Meat of the Matter", focusing on the global-warming impacts of the livestock industry. Oddly, while the article brought out a lot of numbers it did not include a single photograph of any disturbing meat-animal production facilities (like the feedlot above). Rather, "E" chose to include several pictures of cute Holstein dairy calves. The magazine may be trying to keep the visual material light, or it might be kicking off a broad campaign against all farmers with cattle, or perhaps obtaining stock photos was easiest for Holsteins. Whatever the reason, I need to respond to the implication that dairy cows (and their care) are no different than the beef cow industry.

It is a fact that Americans eat vast quantities of meat, and this leads to the butchering of about 30-35 million cows a year; more red meat slaughter data than you'll ever need is found here. About three-quarters of these cows were raised for the sole purpose of becoming meat, and those in the beef business use breeds like Herefords, Angus, or Limousin. Beef cattle often spend the first part of their lives on grass, but almost all of them stand in feedlots for their final few months. Feedlots push grain through their cattle and move them on to the slaughterhouse when they are 15-20 months old. Once again, about 75% of our beef comes from cows raised with the specific goal of turning them into steaks.

Dairy cows, in contrast, make up a tiny fraction of our hamburger supply--about seven percent. Holsteins are raised with the goal of producing milk for many years; some of them don't produce very effectively and are eventually sold for meat, but every dairy cow at least gets a chance to have a calf and live to a minimum age of three. The average Holstein lives about five years, and they do so far more naturally than beef cows.

One of the accusations leveled at the livestock industry is that it feeds vast quantities of grain that could be better used to feed people. While this may be justified for beef producers, dairy cows eat diets consisting mostly of forage--various grasses, chopped green corn, and hay. This diet matches up much better with their digestive systems than grain, and forages also require much less work to grow. Since dairy cows need to chew their cud in order to convert all that forage into energy, farmers make sure that they are comfortable enough to spend at least a third of their time lying down and "ruminating". Beef cattle that eat mostly grain don't chew much cud, and thus their comfort becomes much less of a bottom-line issue for the meat industry--witness the feedlots of the southern plains.

One final question: if we admit that some animal protein belongs in our diets, is dairy any more efficient at supplying it than beef? To start, meat averages about one-quarter protein by weight, while milk is a bit more than 3%. Slaughtering a beef cow yields about 800 pounds of meat, while milking a dairy cow for three years produces at least 60,000 pounds of milk. So dedicated beef production results in 200 pounds of protein per animal, while dairy production results in almost ten times as much.

So, don't blame the iconic black-and-white dairy breed for the hundred million other cows that exist solely to feed America's hunger for beef. Don't blame dairy farmers for the inefficient use of grain to get beef cows to slaughter weight quickly. And finally, don't blame dairy farms for methane emissions from manure--they have been leading the way in adopting anaerobic manure digesters, and the farms of Skagit County will soon be among them!

Presenting in Anacortes on August 13th

2008-07-29T15:03:00.001-07:00

In this new era of melting polar icecaps and skyrocketing energy prices, some citizens from our county got together and formed Skagit Beat the Heat. This group has been working to raise awareness of climate change and ways to slow its impact. Now Beat the Heat has invited us to present at their August 13th meeting, at Village Pizza in Anacortes (downtown at 807 Commercial Avenue) starting at 6pm. The meeting is open to the public and any of our other supporters are welcome to show up, especially if they happened to be searching for local groups doing something about global warming!

We are redoubling our efforts to get out in the community, so look for us at various events--it being an election year helps too. I'll also be posting more in coming days, as our schedule has finally opened up after a July full of important dates. Watch this space!

Now we have a problem

2008-07-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, the weekly coal price update from the Energy Information Agency isn't all that interesting. However, in recent months the spot price of eastern low-sulfur coal has broken loose of its historical range and rocketed up into new territory. This is a problem because utilities have been counting on coal to keep providing cheap power while the price of natural gas bounces around. If coal isn't cheap, the price of electricity can no longer be held in check. The legendary mines of Wyoming's Powder River Basin are a thousand miles from anywhere, and the trains hauling that coal use a lot of diesel--high energy prices have pushed through the final line of defense. Now we have a problem.

Conventional Milk is Good Milk

2008-06-19T20:21:00.001-07:00

Most of the dairy farmers in Western Washington proudly produce "conventional" milk; in practice, they use fertilizer on some of their crops and treat their cows with antibiotics if they get sick. I've seen a few of these farmers get quite upset about organic milk marketing implying that they don't treat their animals well; they see unwillingness to use antibiotics on sick cows as inhumane and prohibiting fertilizer as a recipe for inefficient land use. This letter on organic or "rBST-free" milk shows the position that many dairymen take, but now even Darigold--their own cooperative--is banning rBST. The trend towards locally-sourced food may push consumers back towards our farmers; most national organic brands (with the exception of Organic Valley) actually get their milk from tenuously-certified suppliers like Aurora. We invite our readers to visit the Western Washington farms and meet the farmers; after that, they will be proud to drink their milk!

So, how about those energy prices?

2008-06-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

Unless you've spent the last six months in a cave, you've probably heard about the run-up in oil prices. Fewer people, however, have paid attention to natural gas. The chart at right shows the January 2009 natural gas contract, which had reliably traded at around $9/MMbtu until late this winter; for months, I would check the contract each day and considered anything above nine dollars to indicate strong demand.

Those whose job it is to look at the future aren't much help, since they use the past as a guide; unfortunately for them, the energy markets seem to have departed from historical trends. The Department of Energy's "Short Term Energy Outlook" bravely predicts natural gas prices in the $11/MMbtu range through 2009 (somewhat below both current spot and forward levels). The STEO from a year ago (pdf) predicted that 2008 prices would average just over $8.00 (so far, only a few weeks in January got under that price), so clearly no one wants to be the one to introduce a truly scary future scenario.

With higher oil prices, people will drive and fly less, reducing demand and moderating prices. Things may work differently for natural gas, since less natural gas use is discretionary--we don't relax by leaving all the lights on in the house overnight or turning the heat up to 80F. In an earlier post, I discussed natural gas usage in the electricity-generation and fertilizer-manufacturing business. Beyond those and other industrial processes, the vast majority of natural gas is used for space heating and hot water; demand for both may fall, but not immediately and not without substantial adjustment. We have the privilege and the curse of living in interesting times!

Come to Lynden on May 28th!

2008-05-17T11:30:00.000-07:00

Anaerobic digesters are not very photogenic, but we still think they are interesting to visit. Washington state's first manure-to-energy project went online in 2004 at the Vander Haak farm near Lynden. We have visited the digester a half-dozen times and keep coming back, bringing new guests each time. Having this project so close makes it much easier for us to show various stakeholders that the technology works. So we want to invite our readers to tour the Vander Haak digester on Wednesday, May 28th. Give us a call at (360) 424-4519 or send an E-mail to farmpowernw@gmail.com for more information. We hope to see you there!

A Real Press Release

2008-04-24T16:50:00.000-07:00

We have never doubted the support of Puget Sound Energy during the year we have been working with them. Still, we appreciated their willingness to sign a Memorandum Of Understanding to help convince other people they wanted to buy our power. In the spirit of good feeling, PSE also prepared a press release that went out on the wire today. It was picked up by a number of local news sources (even getting 15 seconds of airtime on Northwest Cable News) and we've heard from some people who probably would never known about us. This worked a lot better than doing our own press release!

Farm Power Turns One

2008-04-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

Today marks Farm Power's first anniversary--after a full day of visiting dairy farmers on April 10, 2007, we put our signatures on paper to found the company.

It is fitting that after almost a year of steadily-increasing visibility, we gave our first presentation that was completely open to the public. The photo above shows the nice little group that turned out to hear us at the Rexville Grange on March 27. At the state and national levels, the Grange advocates for farmer-friendly policies; that night, a mix of neighbors, friends, and members just showed up to learn more about local renewable energy. The Grange hall is located only about a mile away from the site of our first project, which will be owned by our appropriately-named subsidiary Farm Power Rexville LLC!

We have been presenting to other community organizations, most recently two different Rotary clubs. However, the Grange seems to most closely match the Farm Power vision, so it is the first organization that we have actually joined. The Rexville branch doesn't have a website, but any interested readers can send a note to their account: rexville_815 (at) yahoo (dot) com. For our younger readers who prefer membership in virtual organizations, Farm Power now has a Facebook group; I'll be posting updates regularly there too.

Democracy!

2008-03-31T23:00:00.001-07:00

Governor Christine Gregoire signed SB 6806 today--let the digester construction boom begin!

Once again, we want to thank Senator Mary Margaret Haugen and her staff for doing all the heavy lifting down in Olympia. Thanks also to all our supporters who contacted their legislators about the bill. This is how democracy works.

All Politics Is Local

2008-03-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

Skagit County is governed by a board of three commissioners; the sole Republican commissioner has decided to retire, so local dairy farmer Ron Wesen stepped into the race to succeed him. We know Ron as the head of the county Dairy Federation and also as a member of the extended Wesen dairy family. Four brothers and their father produce both conventional and organic milk from two different herds at two neighboring farms, the only local operation to do so. Since dairy families make up only about 0.1% of the population of the county, we're pretty excited that Ron has decided to run for commissioner.

I'm a progressive Democrat while my brother is a libertarian-leaning Republican. When it comes to local agriculture and renewable energy, however, parties become much less important. Unless the two Democrats running opposite Ron turn out to be impeccably pro-farming (one's a developer and the other works for a city sanitation department, so....), I'll be voting Republican in this race. In the same way, our state senator Mary Margaret Haugen (D-10th) has been one of our strongest supporters and my right-wing brother will be voting Democrat for her in November.

Two months ago, Senator Haugen introduced SB 6806 to provide tax incentives for anaerobic digesters; in early March, the bill passed the Senate 46-0 and the House 96-1. Even in Olympia, support for farming and green power can cross party lines. We will be driving down to the capital on Monday to watch Governor Gregoire sign the legislation; the first beneficiaries of the tax incentives will be two dairy farmers who currently operate digesters, most likely Republicans!

Eventually, we hope that the political support for anaerobic digesters will stimulate the construction of many more than the one that Farm Power is currently developing. Local agriculture, renewable energy...who can be against this stuff? When politics happen where you live, things get done.

Is Public Power Better?

2008-03-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Several weeks ago, the normally quiet world of utilities vaulted onto the front page of our local paper. The issue is whether our Public Utility District, currently only providing water, should get into the electricity business. One article in the Skagit Valley Herald, "Public or Private", mainly contrasted the local governance of the Skagit PUD with the international ownership of Puget Sound Energy, an investor-owned utility that is being taken private by the Macquarie Group. Macquarie hails from Australia, and its acquisitive desire is apparently driven by compulsory pension investment laws Down Under. Beneath the ownership issue simmers general unhappiness with recent PSE rate increases and--very likely--the impression that public power provides better service at a better price.

Puget Sound Energy's territory wraps around two major publicly-owned utilities: Snohomish County PUD and Seattle City Light. Both of these provide electricity for less than PSE--SnoPUD's rates are about half a cent less on average, while City Light saves its customers almost two cents per kWh. Why is this? In short, public utilities have better access to heritage electrical resources. Heritage resources consist mainly of hydroelectric dams, ridiculously inexpensive sources of power constructed during a mid-century building boom which will never be repeated. The Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency, controls half of the Northwest's hydroelectric dams; federal law requires the BPA to give priority to public utilities and cooperatives.

For many years, the BPA produced so much power that it could supply the PUDs and have plenty left over for investor-owned utilities. However, hydroelectric assets remained finite while the Northwest's population grew. Competition for the power increased, and last year public utilities even took the BPA to court to force it to charge higher rates on some power it sells to its private customers. Unfortunately, most public utilities have done little to develop their own generating capacity as power demand crept up towards their BPA allotments, and no amount of court rulings will conjure up this capacity.

Seattle City Light will be able to weather the upcoming power crunch for a while, since the utility gets half of its power from its own heritage hydro projects. However, this security also means that City Light hasn't pursued new renewable capacity with much vigor.

Snohomish County PUD is in worse shape than Seattle City Light; SnoPUD gets 80% of its power from the BPA, and neither of the generating stations it actually owns have much flexibility to adjust to future loads. Faced with dependency on the open power market, SnoPUD finally decided to try acquiring renewable energy with a Request For Proposal in the fall of 2007. The RFP disappeared off their website several months later, and it remains to be seen whether the PUD's late arrival to the power acquisition party made the proposals too tough to swallow.

In comparison, Puget Sound Energy has been aggressively purchasing both renewable and gas-fired capacity. During the past three years, two new wind farms have added almost 400MW of capacity and two gently-used combined-cycle gas turbines added another 400MW. PSE also began buying the output of the pioneering VanderHaak anaerobic digester, while SnoPUD resisted making a deal for a similar facility proposed by Qualco Energy.

We at Farm Power have developed a great working relationship with Puget Sound Energy; trends at nearby PUDs suggest that enthusiasm for projects like ours would probably decrease if Skagit County's electrical network was publicly owned. Since PSE will be heavily regulated by the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission even under new ownership, we prefer staying with our current cow-power-friendly utility.

Energy Markets

2008-03-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Natural gas futures fell about 8% today across the entire 12-month forward strip, while oil fell at least 4% for the same range. Even in energy markets, these are pretty volatile price moves. The big sell-off may reflect recession fears, unwinding of speculative positions, or new supply data--I don't know which. We do watch the long-term trends, though, since both oil and gas prices affect Farm Power. Fuel costs impact our farmers in many ways: milk haulers raise their rates, tractors cost more to operate, and the general population has less money to spend on cheese. High oil prices function as a sort of tax that cuts even further into the precarious dairy profit margin. However, it is the price of natural gas that sets the boundaries for profitable operation of anaerobic digesters, Farm Power's core business.

While hydroelectric, nuclear, and coal plants provide baseload power, the primary fuel for the final kilowatts added to the grid is natural gas. Electricity production consumes roughly one-quarter of all natural gas delivered in the United States. Modern gas-fired power plants can achieve around 50% efficiency with low maintenance demands, so we can figure the price that utilities pay for their marginal power with a simple formula based on the cost of natural gas. Anaerobic digesters were not economical in the late 1990s, when gas turbines could produce power for less than $0.03/kWh. Today, we know the utilities are facing costs at least double the levels of ten years ago; we have seen corresponding increases in the rates paid to digester projects. Power from heritage hydro, nuclear, and coal is just as cheap as ever, but high natural gas prices have completely changed the prospects for renewable energy.

Natural gas influences agriculture directly through fertilizer production. Almost all of the world's nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from the air with the help of copious quantities of natural gas--around 3-4% of global production. The United States imports much of its fertilizer from natural-gas-rich regions like Russia and Trinidad & Tobago, outsourcing the demand for raw gas, but the fertilizer prices still move with North American gas demand. The most popular nitrogen products have tripled in price. Since anaerobic digesters can break down more than just manure, co-digestion of nitrogen-rich food processing remnants starts to make a lot of sense. Fossil fuel price volatility should not be allowed to wreak havoc with our food supply, and Farm Power will do its part to help agriculture through this time.

Community Visibility

2008-03-10T16:11:00.000-07:00

February has been a busy month at Farm Power, especially in our relations with the wider community. During December and January, our only real visibility came from a mention in the newspaper and brief testimony at a hearing on closing a rural railroad crossing. However, at the end of January we took an interest in the legislative session and rallied our many supporters to contact our lawmakers. We won't know the results for another week, but the support from the Skagit County Commissioners, Northwest Farm Credit Services, Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland, Skagit State Bank, Western Washington Agricultural Association, and others was very gracious and much appreciated.

In the middle of the month, we received great exposure at the annual dinner put on by the Economic Development Agency of Skagit County. Despite still being in the development phase, we were featured on a poster and in the president's presentation alongside successful local businesses. We made some new connections and linked up again with other leaders in our community.

The visibility continues in March. We will be talking about Farm Power on Thursday, March 27, at 7pm in the Rexville Grange. The grange is located just behind the Rexville Grocery, just south of our partner farmers (who are in turn just south of Skagit Valley's major tulip growing areas). We invite our readers to come meet us. Make it an evening outing by touring the fields of West Mount Vernon beforehand. We hope to see you there!

Washington Energy Spending

2008-02-14T16:54:00.001-08:00

Washington Energy SpendingWidgetboxexplanation at the Sightline Institute webpage

Food versus Fuel?

2008-02-03T08:40:00.000-08:00

Developing Farm Power makes us spend a lot of time with numbers, both in our projections and in the performance of other systems. When I compare anaerobic digesters to other types of land-dependent renewable energy, I continue to find that our numbers look far more sustainable than the rest. The food-versus-fuel debate has been driven mainly by critics of corn ethanol, but emerging ag energy sources could actually end up being worse. In comparison, manure digesters create energy while actually strengthening food production--I'll show that in numbers below.

Corn Ethanol=500 gallons per acre (net 35 MMbtus of final energy)
I have little love for ethanol, but in fairness I must bring up two points. First, ethanol production leaves behind at least a quarter of the nutrient value of corn. One acre of Midwestern corn yields about 150 bushels, which modern plants can convert to ethanol at rate of 2.75 gallons per bushel. We now have 400 gallons of low-density motor fuel, but we also have over a ton of high-density animal feed, replacing a quarter-acre of forage that would otherwise be planted. So ethanol gets a 25% bonus for leaving some food value.

Second, many ethanol plants are owned by the communities that supply them with corn. The same interest in self-reliance that sparked the formation of ethanol co-ops now drives efforts to replace natural gas with biomass for creating process heat. For that reason, I don't subtract process energy from the net final energy; I do, however, subtract a couple million btus per acre for fertilizer production, as corn is so nitrogen-hungry that even the best crop rotations still require extra N.

Energy Crops to Digesters=7.5MWh per acre (65 MMbtus intermediate, net 25 MMbtus of final energy)
This is quite common in Europe; taking the animal out of the loop allow digesters to get the full value of corn silage rather than just the leftovers. The digested liquid fertilizes the next season's crops, making a neat closed loop; unfortunately, food production is completely displaced.

Schmack Bioenergy's Pliening biomethane plant in Germany cleans up biogas and injects it into the natural gas grid for use at distant power plants. The plant consumes about 40,000 tons of silage per year, requiring at least 2,000 acres of corn and other forage crops. Germany pays such high rates for renewable energy that this sort of scheme makes sense even though the linear process yields no other benefits. For certain countries, Food versus Liquified Natural Gas from the Middle East to Keep Warm in Winter might be a debate that food occasionally loses.

Cellulosic Ethanol/Biomass Gasification=?
Range Fuels may be closer to finding the energy holy grail George Bush introduced to the country two years ago, but until the technology actually becomes commercialized we won't know much about how efficient it is. Everyone seems to agree that the final energy yield of a ton of biomass will be considerably lower than a ton of corn, so the process had better be much more efficient. No one has developed such a process to date.

Crops to Dairy Cows, Manure to Anaerobic Digesters=1.5MWh per acre plus six tons of milk (5MMbtus of final energy, to be enjoyed with plenty of cheese and butter)
The main difference between feeding corn to ethanol plants and feeding it to dairy cows supplying a manure digester is that the byproduct of the latter process is edible to most humans. To this point in history, ruminant animals have been our most efficient way of turning cellulosic biomass (or grass) into usable energy (or fats, proteins, and carbohydrates). Dairy production falls short of soybeans in raw protein yield per acre, but having animals closes the fertilizer loop and--after adding anaerobic digesters--produces energy as well. Here's the basic calculation: the 5-7 dry tons of forage from one acre, when fed to a comfortable cow, turns into milk and at least twenty wet tons of manure. Wet manure, when fed to an anaerobic digester, yields a half-million btus of biogas per ton, which is combusted for green power.

The number of acres of corn planted for ethanol and the number of acres planted to feed dairy cows will be roughly the same in 2008 (almost 20 million). Wouldn't you rather have a cold glass of milk with your renewable electricity rather than some moonshine with your commute?

A Legislative Strategy?

2008-02-02T10:20:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy week at Farm Power. On Monday we woke up to several inches of snow but proceeded to drive down to Olympia where we testified in support of Senate Bill 6806 at an Agriculture and Rural Economic Development meeting. Our state senator, Mary Margaret Haugen (D-10th District), introduced this bill after staff members we've talked to spotted an easy election-year issue in extending a six-year property tax breaks to anaerobic digesters (only biofuels manufacturers receive it currently).

We spent over an hour waiting for a line of agricultural spokesmen to comment on another bill designed to study a potential farmland/habitat program, and then we waited for an engineer to explain his company's new tire-filled digester design to the senators. By the time we took over the stand, the room was noticeably emptier than earlier. We gave the committee a comparatively high-energy presentation, however, and readers can watch online at TV Washington by skipping over the first 1:14:00 of video.

Our friends from the Dairy Federation had already left for their lunch dates, but we did get support from a Puget Sound Energy representative. The bill will get some fiscal analysis before the committee votes on it; we hope any amendments will prove easy to add and help the bill move easily into the full Senate, also picking up a companion bill in the House. This year is a short legislative session, so few of the ideas introduced will actually get anywhere, but our senator has enough pull to move things along and the timing for renewable-energy/climate-change legislation is good.

After leaving the state capital, we continued south to the Harvesting Clean Energy conference in Portland. This wasn't as relevant to our business as the AgSTAR conference two months ago, but it gave us a chance to bond further with people from the USDA (who will be helping us with our $500,000 grant application) and state agencies (who will be working with us on regulatory issues). We returned home Tuesday night quite weary; maybe we will be called down to Olympia again, but hopefully not too soon--we like being in Skagit County!

Do farmers deserve a middle-class income?

2008-01-20T18:16:00.000-08:00

I started reading Barbara Kingsolver's
"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" last week and have been thoroughly enjoying it. However, I have noticed its critique of mainstream agriculture is not paired with empathy for average farmers, such as found in other books such as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (post on that book to come).

Here's an example: Kingsolver's husband Steven L. Hopp steps in on page 76 to write approvingly about the supposed advantages of micro-agriculture: "Small farms less than four acres in size had an average net income of $1400 per acre. The per-acre profit declines steadily as farm size grows, to less than $40 an acre for farms above a thousand acres. Small operators have to be both grower and marketer... They're doing everything right, they just need customers..."

The thing that stands out right away is that the income from a four-acre farm makes a minimum-wage paycheck look pretty attractive. If this is the definition of a small farm, then the only people who can afford them either work other jobs, receive pensions, or are simply independently wealthy. As the USDA chart above shows, these people regularly put in hundreds of hours of unpaid work or write off the value of the land.

It's only the much maligned "big" farmers who seem to actually worry about things like paying off mortgages or earning a living. Fortunately, most of those who farm hundreds of acres or work with hundreds of animals have managed to survive on their incomes as full-time farmers. And that's good news for us: if our flour all came from four-acre wheat farms or our milk came from four-cow dairies, paying six dollars for a loaf or a gallon would suddenly become a bargain rather a guilt-assuaging indulgence.

Here in Skagit County, our organic family farms are mostly in the hundred-acre range, but they are able to sustain a respectable standard of living from the full-time work. Golden Glen Creamery on the north end of the Valley is not organic, but about 70 naturally-raised cows provide milk for a line of dairy products that support an extended family in a way that a couple of goats down the road from the Kingsolver cabin never could. Sustainable agriculture that doesn't provide a living for its farmers isn't sustainable; "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" would have done better to celebrate farms that actually work.

In other news, we received a little more press in our local paper over the holidays when the Skagit Valley Herald made a courageous decision to annoy a large minority of its subscribers with a week-long front-page series of articles on climate change. Eventually we'll actually have enough developing that we can write a press release!

Will milk prices keep supporting farmer margins?

2008-01-14T17:14:00.000-08:00

Even with historically high milk prices, dairy farmers aren't feeling too secure in their profitability. Input prices continue to rise, threatening margins. This can be seen most easily with corn prices.

Washington dairies do not depend on Midwestern corn. Unlike feedlot beef cattle, dairy cows primarily consume local grass or chopped-corn silage, augmented by alfalfa hay grown in drier regions. However, as grain prices have risen, crop farmers have shifted more of their fields to grain production with predictable effects on the availability of land for feeding cows.

Corn, soybeans, and wheat are all setting records this year. Corn futures on the Chicago Board of Trade are near the record of $5.50 a bushel set during the 1995-96 drought, and the chart of historical corn prices above shows that--in nominal terms--we are in new territory. Even here in Skagit County, winter wheat--a lowly rotation crop--is experiencing a boom as farmers contract for May prices quadruple the historical average. Landowners accustomed to earning a few hundred dollars per acre providing feed for dairy cows can rake in up to two thousand an acre by switching to wheat.

What is going on? The market seems to be driven by both American biofuels and international food demand. Almost a quarter of U.S. corn will be turned into ethanol this year, but strong exports have added fuel to the fire. Wheat does not have much of a biofuels role, so its price reflects a larger shift in worldwide carbohydrate needs.

At Farm Power, high grain prices will push our partner farmers into even greater reliance on their own land for animal feed. We have noticed increasing interest in our plans to increase the nutrient value of manure that we process, so we hope to start helping reduce feed production costs before higher prices really start to bite. Those farmers who have been adding extra grain to their cow rations will undoubtedly cut back, although milk production will suffer. As long as milk prices remain high, the transition won't be too painful; with a little luck, by the time margins start getting squeezed Farm Power will have its first digester running and provide a little more cushion. In the end, that's why we're here.

When is it time for a break?

2007-12-21T16:32:00.001-08:00

Dairy farmers have reason to celebrate this holiday season. Milk prices are at record levels and look to stay high well into next year. Although costs have risen substantially (driven by the doubling of corn prices), everyone is making money and catching up after a terrible 2006.

I am about ready to turn off this computer for a few days. Our schedule has been slowing down all week, redeemed only by a meeting set up by our friends at Skagitonians to Preserve Farmland. We keep pushing forward where we can, but sometimes it's difficult not to feel like we've already started a undeservedly long holiday break.

Our farmers don't have to worry about any such feelings. Cows require just as much care on Christmas as they do any other day, regardless of the plans of relatives. All entrepreneurs expect their work to displace leisure at certain points, but dairy farmers are among the few who know this will happen for the duration. When things get busy for us next year, we can only hope to match their work ethic. To all our friends, Merry Christmas!

Is Farm Power working in the right part of the value chain?

2007-12-14T17:01:00.000-08:00

Before we founded Farm Power, some people urged us to find a quiet corner of the renewable energy world and start a little service business; this was supposed to let us gain experience with minimal investment before eventually leading to a real energy-producing opportunity. It would also give us time to find the millions of dollars needed to create a project, perfectly reasonable advice given our limited resources.

We didn't take it. From the beginning, we have believed that what the renewable energy industry needs is not more service providers but more actual owners. As long as we count the number of small utility-grade (100kW to 10MW) green power installations in Washington on one hand, we continue to see an implementation problem. So we dived right in and committed ourselves to a business model where we owned and operated multi-million-dollar anaerobic manure digesters.

Our local dairy farmers understand capital-intensive business and took us seriously from the beginning. Their industry draws great numbers of service providers all trying to make money off the actual producers--equipment dealers, seed salesmen, drug companies, feed consultants, milk haulers, processing plants, and many others. All of these depend on a shrinking number of farmers who invest millions of dollars in the daily miracle of primary agricultural production: the sun, the land, green plants, now a baby calf, then milk.

The process of extracting energy from manure has less appeal than caring for animals but it is a miracle in its own right. When bacteria in liquid manure are kept comfortable at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, they begin to produce methane (the main component of natural gas). We cannot duplicate this amazing process any more than we can synthesize a newborn calf or squeeze grass out of a pile of mulch. The further that society gets from the basic natural transformations that make life possible, the more easily "value creation" forgets the importance of the actual "creation" part and focuses solely on "value-added".

I recently finished Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips; one of his main contentions is that economic superpowers rise with an emphasis on production and commerce but eventually begin to decline with an excessive focus on finance. The author traces this trend with the Dutch in the 17th century, the British in the 19th, and Americans during the past few decades. We have found plenty of companies in our industry that provide funding, market products, and consult. While we don't doubt that these businesses can be both useful and lucrative, they don't actually create value; they simply allow existing value to be realized more quickly and efficiently.

As children of rural America, we share with farmers an affinity for actually creating things. Eventually, courtesy of vast numbers of bacteria, we will produce electricity and a sawdust-like fiber from cow manure. By selling these and other products ourselves, we will control as much of the value chain after the initial creation as possible. But, in our opinion, finding the most profitable part of the value chain is answering the wrong question; until the renewable energy industry gets much closer to saturation, we must focus on starting new chains rather than latching on to existing ones. That is what is needed for farmers, America, and the planet.

Good enough on paper to count on in reality?

2007-12-04T15:41:00.000-08:00

I just finished the latest version of the Farm Power pro forma, an enormous set of spreadsheets that peers far into the future and concludes that anaerobic digesters can actually make a profit in the long run. Compared to May, when the first version of the pro forma was completed, we have much more real data and far fewer estimates. However, our digester remains a paper project; in order to make the jump to reality, we need something more than elegant spreadsheets.

We found some of what we were lacking last week at the EPA AgSTAR conference, the country's only manure digester convention. This year people from across the industry gathered in Sacramento, giving the conference an unfortunate focus on California's dysfunctional utilities and environmental laws. The speakers list was not especially strong and some of the vendors brought more hope than actual experience. By the end of the first day, though, we had met the designer of our first-choice digester, the likely supplier of our engine-generator sets, and the owner of the engineering company that will build the whole project. We were finally able to take a few specific questions to the source and--more importantly--get a feeling for what it would be like to work with these suppliers.

We're getting a good feeling. These people are experienced, honest, and dedicated to the success of digester projects. Better than ever before, we can stand in front of farmers, investors, community members, regulators, and other stakeholders to assure them that Farm Power's team will make sure digester projects function as advertised or get back on track when they don't. That confidence isn't something we can express in numbers, but it's absolutely invaluable to making Farm Power a reality.

Should we actually expect farmers to RSVP?

2007-11-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

I was pleasantly surprised on Thursday when a dairy farmer called to confirm he would be attending our county-wide Farm Power lunch. See, we've visited 23 different families representing the vast majority of Skagit County's cows but figured we wouldn't know how many would show up until the food was actually served. Based on the responses we've been getting in person, we expect a good crowd--the word is out and the farmers want to hear more. Another guy--who I've never met and whose father didn't sound too enthusiastic--left an RSVP message this morning! After the end of harvest and manure-spreading season, the dairymen have a little more time and may be able to actually plan their schedules now.

We've also made progress getting quality attention from Andgar, the only real digester builder in the region. We brought potential investors up to visit their Lynden project and showed the engineers we've been dealing with that we actually can bring the necessary players to the table. Andgar will be presenting at the farmer lunch too, although we expect to focus primarily on our ability to help farmers with cow bedding (from digested fiber separated out after manure processing) and fertilizer (through increasing both total and inorganic nitrogen in the manure we return to them).

We'll have a little break around Thanksgiving, but for now we have a very exciting week ahead of us--lots of important interactions and decisions. We hope to have more good news to put here soon!

When is a business truly local?

2007-10-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Farm Power is located in Skagit County, Washington. Our county has few features to boast about; halfway between Seattle and Vancouver B.C., agriculture remains its largest industry. With Skagit County's rural character and limited manufacturing base, median incomes are below the national average. Real estate development provided most of the business momentum during the last decade, but now this sector is stagnating.

One thing that Skagit County does still have is dairy cows. The valley has hosted roughly 15,000 milking head for the past few decades, in spite of plummeting farm numbers and enormous change in the rest of agriculture. Today, about a dozen dairy families own the majority of these cows. While this consolidation has been painful, land limitations have effectively capped farm sizes and even the biggest Skagit farmers are out with their cows every day.

Consolidation has a silver lining--it is easier to communicate with the surviving operators. Farm Power's principals went to high school with some of the same dairy farmers with whom we now discuss manure. Since medium-sized dairy farms almost never have someone in the dark closets they call offices, the accepted way to contact farmers is by tracking them down in person. We at Farm Power have spent the last week doing just that. Having been on many of the farms as children, we know where to go to find second- and third-generation owners. We also visited several farms for the first time, and there is no substitute for shaking a dairy farmer's hand and commiserating about the business.

In short, securing the Farm Power supply chain depends almost completely on relationships. Some of these relationships date back to our parents or to the school playground, while others have started only in recent months. We have benefited enormously from positive coverage in our local newspaper, read by most of the county--and from the common dairy heritage shared by those who trace their roots to the Netherlands. With the fiber bedding product we expect to produce, we also have something to offer the dairy farmers, further deepening our interaction.

Both Farm Power's inputs and products will typically only travel a few miles, a true mark of a local business. The founders operate on their home soil, another argument for being local. But in the final analysis, it is the complicated web of relationships that make Farm Power truly local, plugged in at a far deeper level than supplier-buyer or seller-customer. Farm Power cannot be understood separately from Skagit County; come see our home, our people, and--last but not least--the cows!

What is an MBA good for anyway?

2007-10-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

If it's a degree in Sustainable Business from Bainbridge Graduate Institute, an MBA can be good for saving the world. For Farm Power, the education meant learning the language of business while constantly remembering that business has immense power to do good. BGI is one of the first green B-schools, conveniently offering a hybrid online/monthly-residency program based on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

The school is growing rapidly, so the alumni numbers remain low. About thirty other students graduated from BGI in 2007, and two of them started companies while studying: Olympic Biofuels sells biodiesel on the west side of Puget Sound, and SaulGood Gift Co. sells sustainable gift boxes in Canada. Unlike Farm Power, these companies actually have revenue! They provide inspiration that a degree sometimes simply associated with climbing the corporate ladder still has entrepreneurial energy.

Farm Power is the Answer...what was the question?

2007-10-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

What is an anaerobic manure digester anyway? If you, gentle reader, continue to return to this blog in coming months, you will learn more than anyone should ever need to know about manure-to-energy technology. However, for my first posting, a manifesto: Farm Power is a little company in Skagit County, Washington, dedicated to the preservation of dairy farms, agricultural communities, and civilization as we know it. For our urban readers most concerned about the third goal of Farm Power, let me explain the broader vision.

Are you concerned about sprawl? Farm Power will bring new money to farmers, allowing them to continue using their land profitably in the face of rising property values. Rather than selling off ground for development, healthy dairy farms will expand by purchasing land needed for more crop production.

How about global warming? Farm Power will cut emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas at least twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Within just a few years, the continuous effect will be like parking thousands of cars.

Is renewable energy your issue? Farm Power will generate electricity from the untapped potential of manure; just five cows can power a typical house year-round. In places like Western Washington, manure provides local energy in signficant quantities where wind and sun cannot.

Perhaps economic inequality is your cause. Farm Power will reverse the flow of financial resources out of poorer rural communities, investing millions of dollars in new income-generating assets. Local workers, businesspeople, and investors all benefit from keeping money closer to home.

Nitrogen pollution; sustainable agriculture; fuel vs. fuel competition; Farm Power addresses some of the largest problems we face. Stay tuned for more on how!