Cow power! Turning manure and food waste into electricity in England

Waste from the cows and food products are used to produce gas to power electric generators in a city in England, it has been revealed.

John Wintle monitors the engine inside the control room, where gas produced by mixing cow manure and food waste powers a generator and produces 5.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity, at the Stonyvale Farm in Exeter.

Every day in rural Penobscot County, a large dairy farm harnesses clean-burning gas from cow manure and food waste, and it generates enough electricity to power 800 homes continuously.

The process, commonly known as cow power, has the potential to earn the facility $800,000 a year. It also creates byproducts -- animal bedding and a less-odorous fertilizer -- that save the farm about 100,000 dollars a year.

Cow power is more consistent than solar and wind energy, and it eliminates greenhouses gases that otherwise would enter the atmosphere.

For the past 13 months, Exeter Agri-Energy has been combining cow manure and industrial food waste at this location, the Morning Sentinel reported.

In its first year, the company generated 5,200 megawatt-hours for the grid, which earned the farm about 520,000 dollars from Bangor Hydro Electric. Now that the kinks have been worked out, the facility is on track to produce about 8,000 megawatt-hours a year. At 10 cents per kilowatt hour, that's 800,000 dollars.

The project was installed in four months beginning in August 2011. It cost 5.5 million dollars and received 2.8 million dollars in grants from Efficiency Maine, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Treasury Department.

The facility is a subsidiary of the Foglers' Stonyvale Farm, which hosts the project on its land.

Stonyvale also supplies the system with 20,000 gallons of raw cow manure every day.

The manure, which is produced by 1,800 cows, is plowed from the barn floors by a skid steer and diverted into a pump house. From there, the manure is pumped about 1,000 feet through underground pipes to Exeter Agri-Energy, where it enters the facility's anaerobic digesters -- two silolike containers that each hold about 400,000 gallons of manure and food waste.

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