Holy cow! Skagit dairy digester coming soon

Kevin and Daryl Maas are two amazing guys, and they are about to see nearly three years of hard work come to fruition. Kevin (33 and seen at right with your humble blogger) is a former school teacher and his younger brother Daryl (31) is a retired Air Force captain. Both shared a vision of helping family farms in Skagit County, and of getting into the renewable energy business. Turns out, doing one meant doing the other as they started a company called Farm Power.

On Monday, Sept. 28, I will join the Maas brothers at the ribbon-cutting for their aenerobic dairy digester as this amazing renewable energy facility goes into service helping to power PSE's Green Power Program. The facility takes good ol' cow manure and turns it into methane which then runs a huge V-16 piston engine generator capable of making 750 kilowatts, or about what's needed for approximately 500 homes.

The cool thing here is that the technology takes waste and turns it into something useful. The process creates energy, but also reduces the amount of harmful nitrogen in the remaining manure, is less odiferous than traditional manure settling ponds and even leaves a nice, clean straw bedding for old bossy to bed down on.

The digester is versatile, too, with one photo here showing Kevin describing the facility to me as a truck containing 5,000 gallons of chicken waste (yech) adds its goop to the manure stew fermenting inside the digester (which is a covered, concrete box about the size of a tennis court).

One cool example of elegant engineering - the manure is heated to about 110 degrees to start the fermentation process by using the waste heat from the generator's radiator, making the whole thing incredibly self-sufficient.

Excited about this kind of technology? Then sign up for PSE's Green Power Program, which has contracted to be the exclusive power purchaser. By being a Green Power customer, you help give guys like Kevin and Daryl a market for their product, and as Kevin explained to me, the project may be about renewable energy and helping local farmers, but somewhere along the line a banker has to step in and finance the whole shebang.

Your participation in the Green Power Program provides proof of a market for the energy, which makes banker's smile. Grants from the State of Washington and support from Skagit County community leaders such as Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen helped a lot as well.