Green Wombat

Cow Power

I look at the face of renewable energy and it looks back at me with big brown eyes and says, "Moo."

Meet the cows of Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, Vermont. Each of the 2,000 cows produces not only milk but 200 watts of power a day. Cow manure is fed into a anaerobic digester on the farm, where bacteria strip away pathogens and produce methane gas. The gas powers a generator that produces electricity, which is fed into the grid operated by Central Central Public Service, the local utility. Cows are king in Vermont and about 75 percent of the state's agricultural revenue come from dairies. But cow poop releases methane, a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, and creates a huge waste management headache for dairies like Blue Spruce Farm, owned by the Audets family.  "We weren't thinking of global warming when we dd this, we needed to do deal with the waste problem," says Marie Audets, a no-nonsense woman who has worked on farms most of her life, as she showed me and a group of environmental journalists around Blue Spruce Farm.

Vermont is not the only state experimenting with cow power - California is home to some 2 million cows and this month Pacific Gas & Electric signed a deal to buy methane gas from Microgy, a company that will build four digesters on Big Ag dairy farms. What's different about Vermont cow power is that it's connecting consumers to family farms that are struggling to cut costs as milk prices fall. CVPS customers who sign up for cow power pay a 4 cent kilowatt-hour premium, or about $5 to $20 more a month for their bovine-sourced electricity.

The Audets financed the methane digester shown above. It captures the methane that would be released into the atmosphere and turns it into electricity that Blue Spruce sells to CVPS, effectively reducing the farm's net power costs to zero. The digester's byproduct is sterilized manure (shown at right), which is used as cow bedding instead of increasingly expensive sawdust. That saves the dairy as much as $100,000 annually. Cow power is another example of what's good for the environment is often also good for the bottom line. The effort got a big boost Thursday when a local environmental liberal arts school, Green Mountain College, agreed to power its campus with cows. CVPS is working with four other farms to install methane digesters.

Silicon Valley's Solar Gold Rush

Be sure to check out "Here Comes the Sun" in the November issue of Business 2.0 now hitting the newsstands. The feature written by my colleagues Michael Copeland and Tom McNichol (and edited by the wombat) takes an in-depth look at the solar gold rush now on in Silicon Valley. I love being a magazine editor, but one of the frustrations of working at a monthly in the Internet age is finishing an edit of a good and exceedingly timely  story and then waiting weeks before it gets into readers' hands.

Click on the link above for the full story. Here's an excerpt:

The rapidly expanding alternative-energy economy promises to shake up the way power is produced and consumed as profoundly as Silicon Valley's computer and Internet companies upended global communications and commerce in the late 20th century.

The signs of world-changing transformation are everywhere: Venture capitalists are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Valley solar startups pursuing technological breakthroughs to make sun power as cheap as fossil fuel. Three of the largest tech IPOs of 2005 were for solar companies, including San Jose-based SunPower, a spinoff of chipmaker Cypress Semiconductor (CY).

Other old-line Valley tech companies are also jumping into the market. Among the most significant is Applied Materials (AMAT). The world's largest chip-equipment maker will begin producing machines to manufacture solar wafers, laying the groundwork for an industrial infrastructure that should lower the cost of producing solar cells. For the first time in many years, high-tech manufacturing plants - yes, factories - are being built in Silicon Valley.


 

What's Next for the Aussie Solar Tower?

The Australian government’s decision to award Solar Systems a $A75 million (about $US57 million) to build the world’s largest solar power station in the Australian state of Victoria is a big setback for rival EnviroMission. The Melbourne company is seeking to build a 50-megawatt, 1,600-foot-high solar tower power plant in the state of New South Wales, just over the border from Victoria. EnviroMission had competed for the grant, which it was counting on to jump-start construction of the solar tower next year and attract additional investors. The grant, part of the Australian government’s Low Emissions Technology Demonstration Fund, is intended to give renewable energy companies enough cash to get their projects off the ground and demonstrate their technology’s feasibility on a large scale.

I chronicled EnviroMission’s six-year quest to build a solar tower on the edge of the Australian Outback in "Tower of Power," which appeared the August issue of Business 2.0.  EnviroMission on Wednesday requested the Australian Stock Exchange suspend trading in its shares pending an announcement on Friday. Originally proposed as a 1-kilometer-high, 100-megawatt plant, the solar tower was redesigned with an eye to winning the government grant. EnviroMission CEO Roger Davey told me in late June that if the company lost the grant it would re-evaluate the tower’s design to ensure its commercial viability and would arrange alternative financing.  Meanwhile, EnviroMission’s joint venture with Chinese investors to build a solar tower near Shanghai is proceeding.

Australia to Build World's Largest Solar Power Plant

Just a quick post before I get on a plane: Australian company Solar Systems announced it will build a 154 megawatt solar power station in the state of Victoria. The company on Wednesday received a $AUS 75 million grant from the Australian federal government to fund construction. The Victorian state government is kicking in an additional $AUS 50 million.

Solar Systems' plant, to be completed by 2013, will use Heliostat Concentrator Photovoltaic technology, developed in part with a subsidiary of Boeing. More on this when I land.

How Green is Your Computer?

Laptop and desktop computers will need to get greener to qualify for a coveted Energy Star rating from the federal government. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has unveiled new power consumption standards that take effect July 20, 2007. The EPA claims by raising the energy efficiency bar, computers that carry its green seal of approval will be an average 65 percent more efficient than their conventional counterparts. According to the feds, if U.S. businesses bought only Energy Star computers, they'd save $1.2 billion in electricity costs over the next five years. If the government follows its own advice, it would eliminate 2 billion pounds of greenhouse gases a year.

Computer makers whose products qualify can emblazon the Energy Star logo on their cases - and are required to display the logo on the startup screen. Of course, they also can cash in on the cachet of being ecologically correct  - no small advantage these days. (Curiously, though, most companies whose computers currently carry an Energy Star rating don't seem to promote that fact.)

Now, this is all good and green but there's an ozone-hole-over-the-Antarctic-sized gap here: the Energy Star program does not apply to computer servers, those supercharged electricity hogs that power Google and much of our economy. Sun Microsystems has been trying to capitalize on the efficiency of its servers with a green-themed advertising campaign - a postcard the company sent me this week highights the fact that a large server farm uses as much energy as a city of 40,000 people. But by including servers in the Energy Star program, the feds could give corporate buyers a quick and verifiable measure of energy efficiency and perhaps spark more competition among server makers.

Green bedfellows: MTV and Wal-Mart

There are days when it seems the current rage for all things green is about to jump the shark. Take today's deal between two brands not often mentioned in the same breath:  MTV and Wal-Mart. The former voice of youth culture and the merchandiser to middle America are teaming up on a joint venture called Everyday Green. The initiative is "designed to promote sustainability and demonstrate to consumers how to work environmentally-friendly products into their lives," according to the announcement.  MTV's New York City retail store has been turned into an eco exhibit where shoppers can ride a bike to power a wall of energy efficient light bulbs and learn about wasteful household appliances, recycling, etc.  Among the green products for sale alongside organic t-shirts and re-useable water bottles are LCD television sets. Hmmm. Now if they can just hook that bike up to the electricity-sucking TV.....For more on other companies jumping on the green bandwagon, check out Madison Avenue West, written by my Business 2.0 colleague Susanna Hamner.