Friends of Rural New York

Farm sees gas as new cash cow
Dairy operation hopes to use methane from manure to generate electricity
 
By ERIC ANDERSON, Deputy business editor
Albany Times Union

First published: Friday, January 27, 2006
BRUNSWICK—If all goes well, a year from now Herrington Farms Inc. in rural Rensselaer County could be producing enough electricity to power more than 350 homes, as well as the farm buildings themselves.
The only gas it will use to do this will be the methane from the manure produced by the farm’s 580 dairy cows and from crop and food wastes.
The price Herrington gets for its electricity could yield “significant potential income for the farm,” said Stephen Hoyt, chief operating officer and project manager for Troy-based Saratoga Biogas LLC.
Essentially, the project could end up turning manure into money.
Much still must be done before that point is reached, however. First, there’s the matter of financing. The average cost of a 500-kilowatt installation is $1.5 million, said Lawrence Rosenbaum, chairman and co-founder of Saratoga Biogas, which is overseeing the project.
Although renewable energy projects such as this are encouraged by policymakers, the financing is not yet in place, despite $450,000 in state and federal grants to assist the effort.
That leaves slightly more than $1 million to get the project built.
Ken Green, president of the Saratoga Economic Development Corp., who has been working with Saratoga Biogas, sees two big advantages to the project.
“If we can generate more revenue, reduce costs and reduce energy demand, it makes farms more viable and it increases our open space,” he said.
Green has seen the technology being planned for Herrington Farms in operation in Germany, where at least 600 of these mini-power plants are online.
Sebastian Muehlhuber, who co-founded Saratoga Biogas with Rosenbaum, is mayor of the Bavarian city of Rott-am-Inn. The men met in 1969 during a summer language program in Germany that was sponsored by the University at Albany.
It wasn’t until spring 2004 that they decided to import the technology here and launched their company.
Now, rising natural gas prices have pushed electricity costs higher, encouraging the search for new power sources. Methane digesters are becoming more commonplace on farms across the state, and in October the state Public Service Commission included them in New York’s Renewal Portfolio Standard program, which seeks to increase to 25 percent the amount of electricity generated from renewable resources by 2013.
Herrington Farms would be the first to use German fermenter-based technology, which permits the use of crop and food wastes as well as manure, and produces methane more efficiently, Rosenbaum said.
Producing the methane that is burned in the power plant basically eliminates the manure odor and makes the manure more valuable as a fertilizer, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers on the farm, said Saratoga Biogas’ Hoyt.
The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority is assisting with the project, said spokesman Tom Collins. A $330,000 NYSERDA incentive grant is part of the financing.
Rosenbaum said the digesters could also be installed at commercial sites that produce large amounts of crop and food wastes but not manure.
If all goes well, Saratoga Biogas hopes to begin construction on the Herrington Farms project in early summer. The project is expected to take six months to complete. by e-mail at