Stinky Electricity In California
Central California is home to nearly 1.6 million dairy cows and their manure — up to 192 million pounds per day. It’s a mountain of waste and a potential environmental hazard.
But for dairyman John Fiscalini, the dung on his farm is renewable gold: He’s converting it into electricity.
At his farm outside Modesto, a torrent of water washes across the barn’s concrete floor several times a day, flushing tons of manure away from his herd of fuzzy-faced Holsteins and into nearby tanks. There, bacteria consume the waste and release methane, which is then burned in a generator capable of producing enough power to run Fiscalini’s 530-acre farm, his cheese factory and 200 additional homes.
Fiscalini’s resourcefulness should be drawing accolades, considering that state mandates are requiring California industries to boost renewable energy use and slash greenhouse gas emissions sharply over the next 10 years.
But efforts to convert cow pies into power have sparked controversy. State air quality control regulators say these “dairy digester” systems can generate pollution themselves and, unless the devices are overhauled, are refusing to issue permits for them.
The standoff underscores how conflicting regulatory mandates are making it hard for California to meet its green-energy goals.
“We didn’t expect this,” said Michael Gallo, chief executive of Joseph Gallo Farms in Atwater, Calif., whose family has spent “a lot of money” to get its dairy digester system compliant.
The idea of turning biological waste — whether manure, trash or grass clippings — into fuel has been around for centuries. Technologies vary, but the idea is to extract methane from decomposing organic material, remove impurities and burn it for heat, light or transport. Interest boomed after the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international treaty on climate change. Methane, considered by many scientists and environmentalists to be as damaging a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide, was among the key six pollutants targeted.
Today, the European Union is leading the global charge to turn waste into watts; more than 8,000 biogas operations are up and running in Europe, and thousands more are slated to open in the next decade. The United States, which has not ratified the Kyoto accord, has only about 150 digester projects operating at livestock farms nationwide, said Chris Voell, a manager of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AgStar program, which works with farmers to get such systems up and running.
The concern: NOx.
Air district officials said they’re just doing their jobs. Combating smog, not climate change, is the agency’s mission.
“The board has been clear that when we’re faced with these sorts of trade-offs between reducing greenhouse gases and reducing NOx, we’re going to choose NOx,” said Dave Warner, director of permit services for the San Joaquin Valley air quality district.
The farmers “should have checked in with us first, before buying their equipment,” he added.
Last year, six dairy digesters were shut down because of regulatory or financial problems. One of them is at Ron Koetsier’s dairy in Visalia.
Koetsier shut the system down. Now the equipment is collecting dust.
“They have a point. I want clean air,” Koetsier said. “But it doesn’t make financial sense for me keep doing this. I don’t see how they can turn methane gas into electricity in California, given these rules.”
Filed Under: Environment
