Renewable Energy at Skagit Human Rights Festival

I will be at the historic Lincoln Theatre in Mount Vernon this Thursday evening (March 5th) for Renewable Energy night. The 56-minute documentary "Kilowatt Ours" will be shown at 7pm, followed by a panel including yours truly. Other panelists are wind developers and energy efficiency experts. This is about as local as we can get--gathering with others from Skagit County concerned about sustainability; if you are able, please join us.

Economic Stimulus

Last week, Snohomish County PUD announced it had agreed to buy power from an Oregon wind farm. This "Hay Canyon" purchase comes several months after a similarly-sized deal for power from a project with a similarly-bland name, Wheat Field, also located in north-central Oregon.

Why would a citizen-owned Washington utility look south of the Columbia River for renewable energy? The answer is simple: subsidies. Oregon provides a tax credit of up to $10 million to renewable energy projects built in the state; although each of the wind farms mentioned above will cost around $200 million to build, the credit must make Oregon's electricity slightly cheaper than unsubsidized Washington green power.

Not everyone is thrilled about the attractiveness of Oregon's subsidies; some residents argue against providing benefits to out-of-state energy buyers. What is undeniable, however, is that building renewable energy projects in this economy makes a huge difference to workers and communities nearby. A 100-MW wind project like Hay Canyon or Wheat Field typically provides over a hundred jobs during construction, adds a dozen permanent maintenance positions, and pays a half-million dollars a year in property taxes. For the people working these jobs and the counties gaining tax revenue, location matters.

We finally started pouring concrete on Thursday. Our contractor handles materials purchasing, but confirmation calls from local suppliers show the impact Farm Power spending has. Drivers at Skagit Ready Mix care very much that this digester is being built here rather than Oregon; employees of Mount Vernon Building Supply probably feel the same way. Good policy should find a way to encourage both the purchase of green power and its production as close to home as possible.

Faith

The new year begins with a sense of ominous foreboding in the dairy community. The chart above shows the milk price returning to where it was two years ago. During the summer of 2007, dairy farmers were making quite a bit of money; they continued to do well until input prices (especially grain, diesel, and alfalfa hay) caught up with them last summer. Farmers are now seeing some serious red ink, and the milk futures market looks absolutely appalling.

Farmers have come to expect bruising price cycles, but the swings during the past few years are unprecedented. It takes a uniquely durable type of person to get up each morning and work a fourteen-hour day taking care of cows while knowing they are going to lose a thousand dollars before bedtime. And yet the milk continues to show up on the store shelves.

Many of the families who still run dairy farms are deeply religious; at times, only belief in the wisdom of a higher plan can keep people in such a low-margin, capital-intensive business.

We at Farm Power share the faith of these dairy farmers, the belief that God is absolutely sovereign and carries out His plan through people whether they accept Him or not. During nearly two years of work, we have been protected in more ways than we know. What others might call successes, sometimes we can only call blessings, unachievable by us on our own.

At the groundbreaking, our pastor read Psalm 8 and prayed "Bless this anaerobic digester." We thank God for our community, our families, and bringing us this far; we pray that He will bless those who are struggling in this economy and our work to bring some relief.

A Century of Delicious Dairy Products

I love the classic dairy images in this picture from our groundbreaking: in the middle are two dairy farmers dressed up for the occasion, and on the right is a farm inspector from the state department of agriculture. At left is our local Dairy Ambassador, a high school senior chosen each year to lead outreach efforts for the Washington State Dairy Women. Over the years, many Dairy Ambassadors have been drawn from the dairy-family-heavy school that we attended, so it was great to have the current representative at this key Farm Power event.

The dairy industry has had to work increasingly hard to keep milk in the diets of consumers, using everything from Dairy Ambassadors to the "Got Milk?" campaign. Once literally at the center of life for most of the population, milk is now competing with a dizzying array of other products for attention on supermarket shelves. Per-capita consumption of all dairy products has stabilized during the past fewer decades but remains lower during the first half of the 20th century--down about a quarter. The average American now drinks a bit less than 25 gallons of milk a year, about a third less than at the mid-century average. Butter consumption has fallen even more steeply; during the first few decades of the century, Americans were each enjoying almost 20 pounds of butter annually (more than half of all milk was consumed in this form). Now butter consumption has fallen by 75% (and has, unhappily for our arteries, been more than replaced by margarine and other fats).

Fortunately for dairy farmers, cheese and ice-cream consumption have moved in the opposite direction: ice cream exploded in popularity after World War II, and moderation since then has been more than offset by increased interest in other frozen dairy products. The biggest story is cheese--Americans eat almost ten times as much cheese as they did a century ago. Lest anyone attempt to blame this for American health problems, it is important to note that our cheese consumption still noticeably lags many healthy European countries. For example, the French not only enjoy more fluid milk and butter than Americans--they also eat 50% more cheese than we do!

Milk plays an important role in many food cultures, and we hope that Americans continue to appreciate the delicious variety of foods provided by our dairy farmers. Milk fits easily into a healthy lifestyle and links consumers to a sustainable local food production system. Milk drinkers should be asking where a store's dairy products come from--we'll be proud to tell them when their cheese, sour cream, and butter comes from Western Washington farms.

Construction Pictures

For anyone wondering whether our groundbreaking was ceremonial or real, the answer can be found on on the Farm Power website or on a photo page set up by one of our supporters. We didn't waste any time starting construction; Western Washington will keep getting wetter until sometime next spring, so now is as good a time as any in the next six months.

The concrete forms will start being set next week, and work will continue as the weather permits. Pumps are set up to keep water from soaking the site too badly. Once the floor is poured, work on the walls can proceed without getting as muddy. Check in with us before stopping by--it is a work site with heavy equipment, so visitors need hard hats and someone to escort them, but we'd be happy to show you around.

Will we make a difference?

Now that construction has started and some pressure has shifted to our contractor, I can get back to reflecting on the bigger picture. When we are up and running, our $3.5 million project will produce up to six million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually. That's almost unnoticeable in the utility world--about one day's output from a typical natural-gas-fired power plant.

However, to get that much power from another renewable resource, you would need one large wind turbine (like the Vestas V80 above, one of many on PSE windfarms) or a few acres of photovoltaic panels. A 1.5MW+ wind turbine would cost about the same as our anaerobic digester, but it would have to be located somewhere in the southeast quarter of Washington to produce its full potential. A solar photovoltaic installation could be located in Western Washington, but it would have to extremely large and spectacularly expensive to produce six million kWh each year--30,000 panels costing at least $40 million to install. Moving the installation to California or some other sunny location would cut the size and cost in half, but solar is still the priciest option.

So manure power will make a difference in Western Washington because we have few options here for renewable energy. But more importantly, a digester does much more than just collect the sun's rays or spin in the wind; our project will also be providing free cow bedding to dairy farmers, cutting methane emissions, and reducing manure odor. In the future, we may find valuable uses for all of our extra hot water or discover some new service that we never even imagined the system could do. An anaerobic digester is the Swiss army knife of renewable energy, and we can't wait to get ours up and running!

Groundbreaking

One of the reasons I haven't posted anything during the last month is that we finally broke ground on our first project! About 140 people came out and celebrated with us on October 28th, one of the last sunny days of autumn. It was a great crowd--a mix of farmers, politicians, investors, government officials, neighbors, and other supporters.

We kept the speeches to less than half an hour, but we still got to hear greetings from the governor--brought by her husband Mike Gregoire--and encouraging words from Congressman Rick Larsen, state senator Mary Margaret Haugen, and Puget Sound Energy's Andy Wappler.


We also fit in three separate check presentations, including one representing our loan from Shorebank Pacific shown in the bottom picture. Afterwards, people stayed around to talk for another hour and finish off the snacks, making it a full afternoon.

The Capital Press talked to a bunch of people and ran a great story on the event. We also were mentioned on KPLU the day before and finally made it into Sustainable Industries Journal a few days later. We hope everyone who attended enjoyed the groundbreaking as much as we did; check back for all the postings I skipped during this exciting period!