Cow Power

For most Americans, the value in heaps of cow manure is not immediately apparent. But to energy entrepreneurs like Kevin Best, these oft-disdained piles represent power and possibilities.

Best is founder and CEO of RealEnergy, a Yountville, Calif., independent power producer. RealEnergy builds, owns and operates small, clean and green power plants located on the site of the commercial buildings that use what they generate.

Most of the company’s projects have been relatively small-scale and used traditional fuels such as natural gas. But in 2006, Best reached an agreement with a dairy farm in Oregon to harvest cow manure and turn it into enough electricity to power 500 homes for a year. When completed, the partnership between RealEnergy and Rickreall Dairy will be one of the largest biomass energy producer in the state.

Biomass energy, power made from organic materials such as plants and animal waste, represents the classic win-win for farmers, electricity producers and the public. Biomass is cheaper and cleaner than other energy sources such as fossil fuels and is, of course, renewable. At the same time, manure-based fuels offer farmers a simple, profitable way to manage farm waste and the accompanying odors and environmental issues.

“The farm is thrilled because it has more waste than it can handle,” Best said. In addition to getting its waste management problem taken care of, the farm will get a discount on its power needs. Other projected benefits for the dairy farm and the surrounding community include a significant reduction in environmental impacts, such as odor and runoff.

The project will also greatly reduce the dairy’s greenhouse emissions. When cow manure decomposes it produces methane gas, which is even more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide. Turning the manure into energy is projected to reduce greenhouse gases by more than 59,000 tons per year — the equivalent to removing 8,900 cars from highways.

For its part, RealEnergy will sell the energy it produces through a “microgrid” to the neighboring farms. Under a 15-year contract with PacifiCorp, electricity will also be fed into the public grid and will be available to supply power to affected areas in the case of an outage on the public grid.

While this is only a single project, Best and other entrepreneurs see enormous potential in cow power.

Today, biomass energy, or bioenergy, is the largest source of domestic renewable energy, generating more than 9,733 megawatts of electrical capacity. It takes 2.4 kilowatt-hours (kwh) to power a 100-watt light bulb for 24 hours. A day’s worth of manure from a single cow can produce 6.0 kwh. When multiplied by the 42.3 million cows inventoried by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (as of January 2006), the future of this kind of project looks bright.

Best agrees. The $6 million Rickreall project was financed partially with government loans and energy tax credits. “We expect the Rickreall project to show that it can be profitable by early 2007,” he said. “Then we’re going to build 30 more plants west of the Mississippi by June 2008.”