What source of renewable energy generates enough power each day to support up to 600 homes in the Enumclaw Plateau?
Corn? Nope, this happens to be a view looking southeast from the parking lot at Rainier Biogas. Lots of corn growing on the plateau right now, but not for renewable energy. Instead, the corn is for food to feed dairy cows, whose waste serves to fuel the digester here, producing "natural" gas. The $2 million facility is a partnership between 3 or more plateau dairy farmers and Farm Northwest Power from Skagit County and began operations here in 2012.
Cow manure from dairy farms are brought to the site and fed to an enclosed air-tight million gallon digester where nature's microorganisms break down the waste, producing gas. As we might expect, lots of piping for delivering waste to the digester and delivering gas back to a storage tank where tanker trucks fill their tanks with gas and transport to larger gas storage facilities/users.
I first visited the site in 2012 during it's first year of operation and stopped back by to see what might have changed. Not much change, other than a few pieces of well-used rusted equipment laying around. It continues to amaze me the lack of "smell" from the facility. About the only thing I could smell was some odor from the cow manure stored here - and this was nothing more than you can smell at a dairy farm.
Fun to see still in operation - and successful, I hope, also solving farmers' challenges dealing with waste cow manure.
That corn next door is getting tall - I had to stand on a big piece of concrete to see over the top.
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