The scoop on cow power

Since 2009, half a million kilowatt hours of electricity have been produced on Beaver Marsh Road.

The source of that power? Cows.

While the plant just north of Summers Drive still produces up to 750 kilowatt hours a day – enough to power 550 homes – seismic shifts in energy policy and dairy farming are affecting its business plan.

Co-founders Kevin and Daryl Maas of Mount Vernon started Farm Power Northwest with federal and state grants plus startup funds from local investors, including this reporter’s family.

Once online, Farm Power’s Rexville anaerobic manure digester began converting methane gas captured from cow manure into electricity. A lucrative contract from Puget Sound Energy, plus carbon offset credits and tipping fees from companies that contribute food waste helped Farm Power Northwest build four more biodigesters adjacent to dairy farms in Lynden and Rainier, Washington and two near Tillamook, Oregon.

La Conner resident Joan Cross was an early investor. “I wanted to contribute to alternative energy and Farm Power was at the forefront,” she said.

“Plus it was local, and it helped our farmers.”

Through the Rexville biodigester, Jason Vander Kooy of Harmony Farms has reduced greenhouse emissions while processing waste produced on his dairy farm.

Inside the air-tight digester, composted cow manure and cow bedding are warmed to 100 degrees – the temperature of a cow’s stomach.

“Cow manure provides the bugs, and the substrates, or waste from food processors like Draper Valley, are the energy,” said Vander Kooy. “When you put the bugs and the energy together, that’s how you make the gas.”

Manure processed by the digester becomes liquid fertilizer for forage crops in just 28 days. Straw, corn, grass and other solid fibers that cows do not digest are recycled into clean cow bedding.

“We take a nasty product and convert it into something beautiful,” said Vander Kooy. “We’re changing waste into something very useful, like energy and nutrients.”

That was then …

Farm Power was part of “a big wave of on-farm dairy digesters installed 10 to 15 years ago,” said Peter Moulton, senior energy policy specialist and state bioenergy coordinator for the Washington State Department of Commerce. “The USDA was providing substantial financial assistance to help cover initial capital expense and utilities were trying to ramp up green power.”

At the time, PSE’s price for digester-produced power was among the highest in the US.

While contracts in Oregon are good for six more years, PSE contracts in Washington State have already or will soon expire. The Rexville digester now sells its electricity for several hundred thousand dollars less than it did last December.

“Not only is natural gas practically free these days, wind and solar are getting cheaper and are effectively unlimited,” said Maas. “A Northwest utility can get wind or solar from Montana or southern Idaho for as little as three cents a kilowatt hour – less than what we are getting now.”

In addition, the digesters themselves are aging, and some dairy farms are struggling.

The lid of the digester in Lynden partially caved in at the end of June. Insurance may pay for repairs – but that may be moot, since the partner dairy has gone out of business.

“Without the cows our business model doesn’t work,” said Maas. “We could switch to food waste only, but the digester would work differently, we would be regulated as a solid waste facility and what we produce would be treated as garbage.”

Flanked by the Vander Kooy and Kuipers dairies, the Rexville digester has enjoyed a steady source of manure. But last year Gerritt Kuipers sold his farm to the Vander Kooys and relocated to Oregon. Slightly less manure is provided through the combined operation.

So what’s next? Moulton sees two ways digesters can profit in a low-cost energy landscape.

One is to sell power into California or Oregon, “which offer a pretty substantial agreement to use green power to power electric cars and offset vehicle carbon,” he said. The other is to invest in conditioning equipment to convert raw biogas into renewable natural gas. “Natural gas utilities are now under the same pressure that electric utilities were 10 years ago to de-carbonize the fossil natural gas supply.”

However, connecting to a gas line costs about a million dollars a mile. As for electric cars, “you have to somehow connect that electricity to an electric vehicle using that energy directly,” said Maas. “Unfortunately, we are not in California.”

For now, the Rexville and Rainier digesters are only breaking even, but Farm Power will continue to run them “while we figure out how we can switch to electric vehicle fuel,” said Maas.

While “wheeling” or selling electricity across state lines is complicated and expensive, if Washington’s legislature were to adapt a low-carbon fuel standard, “that would bring the market closer to home,” said Moulton.

“Some opportunities are coming up, I think,” said Vander Kooy. “If I had to do it all over again, I would. A lot of lessons learned, I have to admit, but the digester has been good to us.”

“I think it’s wonderful that this grew out of a farming community,” said Cross. “We should give credit to the farmers who are thinking ahead.”