It's not easy turning poultry litter and pig poop into economic electricity, North Carolina's power providers are finding.
Duke Energy's two Carolinas utilities reported Wednesday that they have agreed with farm and renewable-energy groups to support a delay in a state mandate to make electricity from poultry and swine wastes. The mandate, spelled out in a 2007 law, goes into effect this year.
The agreement supports a request to the N.C. Utilities Commission to give electric suppliers another two years to comply with the law. They won't be able to meet the mandate in 2012 and 2013, the suppliers say.
The suppliers cited "overly optimistic" projections by swine waste developers, leading to contracts being canceled. Poultry waste projects, they say, have been afflicted by cost, financing, permitting and "commercial viability" problems.
The agreement reported to the commission Wednesday is among the Duke utilities, the N.C. Sustainable Energy Association, the N.C. Farm Bureau, the N.C. Pork Council and the N.C. Poultry Federation.
Under its terms, Duke would report its progress in securing swine and poultry power twice a year, set up a website to help energy developers and increase its solar-energy output for 2012 and 2013.
Thursday, August 2, 2012
Delay pig waste-to-energy mandate, utilities ask
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8 comments:
Interesting. Why is it possible for Duke and Progress to take chicken and hog excrement and turn it into annual reports?
tell the cheap pricks at duke to use the 7% increase they stuck to us this year.
or are there 2 sets of laws here in NC ?
1 for corporation
1 for the rest of us
Ignorant people,
Duke, Progress and any other public utility is regulated by the state. They have to make a profit to keep the lights on. The state dictates what the rate increase will be to keep them in business.Do you like to use electric?
Chicken Litter has very low BTU value and its a stupid liberal idea to try to burn shit for power...
The intent is not to burn the Chicken litter, but to extract methane from hog and chicken waste. It is a common process used in other countries.
Other states have ongoing animal waste conversion programs - and the science and machinery is well known and easily replicated.
The issue is that the proponents oversold the program, and underestimated the costs - with Duke, easily knowing better, playing the silent partner.
The law was passed in 2007. It's now 2012. Yet they want another two years? Enough's enough. Time to comply with the law. No more excuses. Stop b.s.-ing around or face some huge fines.
It is the methane from the excrement used to generate power through anaerobic digestion. Our farm is also doing this, but we hope to produce CNG, or compressed natural gas instead of returning excess to the grid. Check out the site www.ringlerenergy.com
I am a Harnett County, NC contract pork producer. We house 7350 to 8000 finish hogs. We store the waste from the hogs in 2 covered lagoons (anaerobic digesters). We glean the methane from this manure through the ambient anaerobic process. We then we use the bio-gas methane produced under these covers to run an internal spark biogas engine. The engine turns a 180 kW generator and we put the resulting renewable energy back into the grid. We need a few biogas equipment improvements but other than that making electricity from swine manure is easy. Come visit our farm (by appointment) and we will show you.
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